Colored Memories: A Biographer's Quest for the Elusive Lester A. Walton

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Colored Memories

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Susan Curtis

Colored Memories A Biog r a pher’s Quest for t h e E l u s i v e L e s t e r A . Wa l t o n

U n ive r s i t y o f M i s s o u r i P r e s s

Columbia and London

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Copyright © 2008 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Curtis, Susan, 1956Colored memories : a biographer’s quest for the elusive Lester A. Walton / Susan Curtis. p. cm. Summary: “Explores the life of African American Lester A. Walton whose illustrious career spanned the ﬁrst six decades of the twentieth century but who is now forgotten. Curtis explores the failure of collective memory and America’s obsession with race as she explains how she discovered Walton and his place in history”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8262-1786-8 (alk. paper) 1. Walton, Lester A., 1882–1965. 2. African Americans—Biography. 3. African American journalists—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Theater critics—New York (State)— New York—Biography. 5. African Americans—New York (State)—New York—Intellectual life—20th century. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Intellectual life—20th century. 7. African Americans— Race identity—Case studies. 8. Memory—Social aspects—United States—Case studies. 9. United States—Race relations—Case studies. 10. Biography—Research—United States— Case studies. I. Title. E185.97.W1344C87 2008 070.92—dc22 [B]2008006204 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: BookComp, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Palatino, Cocktail, and Slogan

Publication of this book has been assisted by generous donations, in memory of James C. Olson, made by Adolf E. and Rebecca B. Schroeder and by Mel and Meta George.

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For my “beloved community,” Faculty and Students in American Studies at Purdue University

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

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Part I: Encountering a Ghost Remembering Walton Chapter 1 Chapter 2

3

Lester and Me Mysteries in the Archives

Part II: Treachery and Duplicity Race Man Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Capitalizing Negro Pictures of His Face A Passing Comment The Crisis on the Links Something Doin’ Some Trip

11 33

79 84 91 108 111 124 134

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Part III: The Man Behind the Scenes Representation

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Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11

156 176 206

Representing the Democratic Party Representing the United States Representing Liberia

Part IV: Trauma Reenactment

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Chapter 12 Chapter 13

233 246

Bibliography Index

Escape of the Kafﬁrs Exodus

273 285

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Preface

If you are asking yourself “Who is Lester A. Walton?” you are puzzling over the same question that launched this project more than a decade ago. If you don’t have to ask, you must be interested in early-twentiethcentury African American stage performance or journalism and recognize Walton as an inﬂuential critic at the New York Age and a feature writer on the staff of the New York World. Either way you might also be wondering why you should read a book about a man who is not terribly well known today. I won’t promise that you’ll know Walton’s life story by the time you ﬁnish this book, but I hope that insights gleaned from various episodes in his eventful life will afford you a new perspective on the United States in the twentieth century. Colored Memories has been described as a “postmodern biography” and as “a series of reﬂections on the historian’s craft.” It is, I think, a combination of the two, and it is most certainly an experimental form of writing. Even though it is about Walton, it does not offer a chronological account of his life. Once I realized that I could not write a biography, I opted to present the fragments within the frame of the research process. It is as much about how I sought the unknown as it is about what I found. I invite you to join me as I retrace the steps of my quest to explain how memory and history, subjects and authors are joined together in complicated ways. Exploring these relationships is another part of this writing experiment. At some level, most of us recognize that memory and history are crucial portals to the past; I believe the distinctions between the two are overdrawn; thus, I make use of various memories—Walton’s, mine, and the nation’s—to interrogate ofﬁcial accounts presented as history.

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At the center of this work is Lester A. Walton, an extraordinary African American man who inﬂuenced important events in the twentieth century and whose disappearance from public consciousness and the historical record presents a mystery that I’ve tried to unravel in a rather unconventional way. Not all of the questions raised can be answered conclusively— and that recognition is itself a kind of truth that reminds us how difﬁcult it is to unlock the secrets of the past. At the same time, in recounting key moments in Walton’s life and using a variety of analytical tools to pry open aspects of experiences long hidden from view, I offer insights into Walton’s signiﬁcance and into other stories that too often are suppressed at the expense of critical national self-consciousness. Authors are unquestionably implicated in their work, but often their role is hidden behind scholarly convention and the ideal of objectivity. By contrast, I convey my relationship to Walton as one that developed and deepened at each contact with him. I came to know him just as I’ve gotten to know family members, friends, and colleagues throughout my life—in pieces and over time, each new encounter adding a layer of knowledge and meaning.

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Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the generous support I have received from a large number of individuals and institutions over the many years I have been working on this book. Thanks to the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, where I teach U.S. History and American Studies, for Research Incentive Grants in 1996 and 2002, an appointment to the Center for Humanistic Studies in Fall 2002, and a sabbatical leave in 2004–2005, all of which facilitated travel to archival collections and uninterrupted blocks of time for writing. The staffs at the following institutions provided excellent guidance and assistance for which I am deeply grateful: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York City Municipal Records, the State Historical Society of Missouri, the Missouri Historical Society, the Illinois Historical Society, the Illinois Regional Archives Depository—Carbondale, the Gallatin County Courthouse—Shawneetown, Illinois, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Chicago Historical Society, Butler Library of Columbia University, St. Louis Public Schools Archive, and the St. Louis Public Library. I am particularly grateful to Sharon Dolan at the St. Louis Public Schools Archive, who not only tracked down information about Walton’s school years but also helped me locate the St. Peter’s Cemetery and cemetery records for the Walton family members who are interred there. She also introduced me to John A. Wright Jr., who shared his extensive knowledge of “The Ville” with me. Diana Lachatinere at the Schomburg Center offered helpful advice on the Walton Papers and Photograph Collection. James Healey,

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the Glen Echo Country Club Historian in St. Louis, answered many questions about golﬁng in St. Louis and shared his extensive research into the stars on St. Louis links as well as the clubs for which they played and the journalists who wrote about their exploits. All of these librarians, archivists, and historians offered indispensable assistance in the quest for Walton materials. Deciding to scrap two hundred manuscript pages was not an easy decision to make; deciding how the project could be framed differently was even more difﬁcult. But the support of several friends and colleagues helped me as I groped my way to another structure for the project. Diane Gruber was an invaluable sounding board as I wrestled with the epistemological issues involved, and she read early drafts of the second version of the project and gave unstinting support to the endeavor as it took shape. Ryan Schneider asked key questions that helped me ﬁnd an appropriate trajectory for the narrative. Later in the process, long conversations with John Stauffer focused the argument and stakes of this book. Chris Lukasik shared his expertise in “reading” visual images and critiqued an early draft of my own reading of the pictures of Walton I had found in various private collections and public works. Mark Lewellen Biddle and Delayne Graham both read the ﬁrst full draft and made extremely helpful suggestions for tightening and improving the narrative—they pinpointed passages that didn’t work as well as those that were more effective. I am deeply indebted to Lester and Gladys Walton’s niece, Karen Day Selsey, who graciously agreed to meet with me while I was in New York in 2002. She answered numerous questions about her “Uncle Les,” shared with me some family materials, and most important, helped me see how extensive the Walton and Moore families’ connections were. My meeting with Mrs. Selsey marked an important turning point in my relationship with her uncle as I began fully to appreciate his central place among the movers and shakers in New York’s African American community through the ﬁrst six decades of the twentieth century. I also want to thank colleagues in American Studies across the country, some of whom may not even realize how important they were to this book: Dave Roediger, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, George Lipsitz, Eric Lott, Kevin Gaines, Penny von Eschen, Vernon J. Williams Jr., and Michelle Stephens, all of whom brilliantly contribute to the ﬁeld with their keen analysis of and sharp writing about American culture. I am grateful to Cary Fraser, Clyde Forsberg, and a colleague at Purdue University, Bill Mullen, for giving me the opportunity to present portions of this work at Penn State, Fatih University in Istanbul, and Purdue. Bruce Clayton and an anonymous reader of the manuscript made superb suggestions for improving it.

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Acknowledgments

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It is a pleasure once again to work with Beverly Jarrett and Sara Davis at the University of Missouri Press. Their support and excellent editorial work are nonpareil. I owe a great debt to students, faculty, and staff in the interdisciplinary program in American Studies at Purdue University. The opportunity to co-teach with colleagues in ﬁelds outside of History and to work closely with creative and brilliant graduate students has opened up numerous theoretical, methodological, and analytical possibilities. The sense of community and the collective search for understanding that characterize this program infuse everything we do in the classroom, in the community, and in our scholarship with purpose and urgency. I am grateful for the chance to be part of this “beloved community,” and it is a pleasure and an honor to dedicate this book to the students and faculty in American Studies at Purdue University. The greatest debt of all is to Charles Cutter, my husband and companion, who knows Lester A. Walton almost as well as I do. He has read or heard every version of this book and has spent countless hours talking to me about Walton, and he shared one important research adventure in southern Illinois in the dead of summer. He is brilliant, patient, and supportive. Thanks for everything, “Buddy.”

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Colored Memories

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Part I Encountering a Ghost

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Remembering Walton

Everything I am about to tell you is true, even though I’m not sure the events happened exactly as I will describe them. They’re true in that they are based on letters, documents, speeches, reports, newspaper articles, receipts, photographs, scrapbooks, and public records I have found scattered across the country in archives, libraries, and historical societies where I searched for the remains of Lester A. Walton. I’ve attempted to follow all the rules that govern historical research—track down as much evidence as possible, weigh it carefully, read it with a critical eye, and try to piece together “what really happened” based on credible documentation. But I’ve decided to break some of the rules of historical writing. You see, I’ve chosen not to proceed in chronological order with Walton’s birth, family, and childhood, and I have included details about my work as a historian, which are normally buried in footnotes or hidden behind the detached voice of authority. I feel a bit like a magician, explaining the tricks that produce the illusion of special power. I owe you that since the tales I’m about to tell invite you to reconsider beliefs about history, beliefs that you may not want to give up. This is the story of a ghost and of my encounter and evolving relationship with him. When Walton was alive—between 1879 and 1965—he was an ambitious, creative, amiable bundle of energy and goodwill and dedicated to the fulﬁllment of American democracy. He was a friend to many celebrities, noted intellectuals, powerful leaders, and public servants, and at different times in his life he enjoyed considerable inﬂuence in his own right. But since his death, he seems to have been largely forgotten—he’s not in the pages of history in all the places where we might expect to ﬁnd 3

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him. He’s a restless spirit looking for his berth in the annals of the American Century he helped to shape, wondering, perhaps, why so few people recognize his name. On the day Walton retired, a top executive at NBC sent him a telegram that insisted he’d be long remembered for all he had done.1 But now, forty years later, he’s a ghost the mention of whose name registers mostly blank stares. In this book, I want to introduce you to Lester A. Walton, but not in the usual way. I don’t want to begin at the beginning, recounting his humble birth to obscure parents and charting his ascent to fame and inﬂuence; I’m not sure such a story could be told. I’m not sure I even want to tell a story, for that implies a continuous narrative in which one scene foreshadows and predicts another and the whole adds up to a linear unfolding of a person’s life. I want to introduce you to Lester A. Walton, but I don’t want him to share the fate of countless other men and women like him, who overcame prejudice against people of color, strove to advance the cause of full citizenship and social justice for African Americans, and achieved a position of some importance only to be forgotten within a generation, “recovered” by some diligent scholar then forgotten once again. This is not a biography; it is a willful effort to remember. As I have come to know Walton over the past decade or so, he has become a palpable presence who has affected my thinking in ways not unlike that of people I have known in life. In fact, I’ve stored a bank of memories about him and about our relationship, from which I am making a substantial withdrawal to write the pages that follow. As you’ll see, I have remembered Lester Walton the way most of us remember people who matter to us—chaotically, anecdotally, and rarely in strict chronological order. When I remember my father, for example, who passed away in 1989, I do not begin with his birth in rural southwest Iowa in 1923 and work my way though his youth during the depression and the lifechanging experience of going to Germany after World War II, where he met my mother, and on through more than thirty-ﬁve years living in a town of ﬁve hundred and working at a natural gas pumping station until a couple of years before his death. I remember him, as all of us remember people and things, when a cue—like the smell of Aqua Velva or an antiFDR diatribe—sends the neurons in my mind racing to ﬁnd the bits of stored experience about how Dad lived and thought. When I set out self-

1. Sydney H. Eiges, National Broadcasting Company, to Lester A. Walton, September 11, 1964, in Lester A. Walton Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York (hereinafter LAWPA), box 22, ﬁle 14. For an account of Walton’s retirement, see New York City Commission on Human Rights 6 no. 5 (Fall 1964), 1, 6.

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consciously to remember Dad, I do so because I need him to remind me of who I am. All of us remember in this way—as past events and people are called to mind by the present, drawing from a memory insights that help us see more clearly, critically, or honestly. This may seem like a peculiar strategy for a historian. After all, it is the job of the historian to put the past in order, to establish plausible causes and effects, and to craft a narrative that places history on a trajectory to the present. As a matter of fact, when I started this project several years ago, I intended to write a traditional biography.2 I had discovered Walton while working on a book about Scott Joplin; Walton’s weekly column on music and drama in the New York Age had become a vital source of information about the famous composer of ragtime music, and I began to wonder who he was.3 I was astonished to ﬁnd that very little had been written about him and licked my chops at the prospect of reanimating a once-inﬂuential African American critic. Moreover, what little had been written about him revealed that he was much more than a journalist and critic—he had served as U.S. minister to Liberia, worked for the Democratic Party in the 1920s and 1930s, and been involved in the post–World War II civil rights movement.4 I imagined, outlined, and began writing a biography that explored the linkages Walton forged between the civil rights struggle, black performance and artistic expression, politics, and diplomacy in the twentieth century. About two hundred pages into the manuscript, I realized that the sketchy accounts of his childhood and family could be neither 2. I published one brief biographical sketch that offers a concise overview of Walton’s life. See Susan Curtis, “Lester A. Walton: A Life between Culture and Politics,” in Nina Mjagkij, ed., The Human Tradition: Portraits of African American Life since 1865, 129–46. 3. Susan Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin. 4. The following document Walton’s work as a drama critic and his involvement in show business in the early twentieth century: Artee F. Young, “Lester A. Walton, Black Theatre Critic”; Thomas Riis, Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890– 1915; Jonathan Dewberry, “Black Actors Unite”; Susan Curtis, The First Black Actors on the Great White Way; and David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927. For references to Walton’s work for the Democratic Party see Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue; and Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR. The following discuss Walton’s work as U.S. minister to Liberia: Walter Christmas, Negroes in Public Affairs; Jake C. Miller, The Black Presence in American Foreign Affairs; Michael Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–1969; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960; and Lloyd N. Beecher Jr., “The Second World War and U.S. Politico-Economic Expansionism: The Case of Liberia, 1938–45,” 391–412. In addition to LAWPA, archival materials can be found in Walton’s State Department papers at the National Archives in Washington, DC; the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Archives, Hyde Park, NY; and the Claude A. Barnett Papers at the Chicago Historical Society.

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veriﬁed nor falsiﬁed, and the all-important narrative arc was impossible to establish. Linkages between art and politics, civil rights and diplomacy were evident, but there were troubling slippages. Missing documents, missing years, absent bylines, racial passing—these slippages between Walton’s private and public personae exposed the inherent inadequacy of biographical writing to reanimate the extraordinary life Walton had led. Property tax receipts appear in Walton’s papers; no deed to the land can be traced. His birth was not registered, but manuscript censuses and St. Louis school records indicate that he was several years older than he claimed to be. Walton built a reputation as a journalist in St. Louis, but the absence of bylines makes his columns challenging to locate. Walton fought for equal treatment of African Americans; yet, some believe he passed. If I could not explain how Walton’s family acquired land in Shawneetown, Illinois, or when and why Walton shaved a few years off his age, or what it meant to have a white maternal grandfather, or whether Walton tried to pass, then how could I know what story to tell? What were the causes, and what were the effects? Were Walton remembered for his role in advancing African American entertainers or engineering the realignment of political afﬁliation or promoting U.S. business and political interests overseas, these private mysteries might be viewed differently. They would be the juicy tidbits to draw readers to examine the dark underbelly of fame. But Walton is not so remembered. His nearly complete absence from the historical record of the United States in the twentieth century is the most troubling—and compelling—slippage of all, and no conventional biography can provide a satisfying remedy or an explanation of the relationship between this individual and the large events he inﬂuenced. But there are other pathways to understanding; this book explores other ways of discovering and writing about a life. I thought about writing a cultural biography or microhistory, genres that have gained inﬂuence in recent decades. These biographies take for their subjects people once celebrated or notorious but long-since forgotten and examine their lives in order to better understand large forces at work. The objective, of course, is to explore past culture, and the authors of such works do not claim for their subjects greatness or inherent importance. Natalie Zemon Davis’s Martin Guerre, Carlo Ginzburg’s Menocchio, or John Demos’s Eunice Williams all caused quite a stir when they were alive, but none would be accused of being a mover and shaker.5 Still, by study5. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms; and John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive. For an interesting discussion of

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ing the documents that exposed an imposter in early modern France, the unorthodox thinking of a miller in fourteenth-century Italy, and a Puritan girl held in captivity who did not want to leave her Indian captors, these scholars were able to bring us narratives that deepened our grasp of power relations and cultural beliefs in places and times far different from our own. What’s lacking in Walton’s life, however, is a single stunning episode that brought him into sharp public focus and around which such a cultural exploration could be developed. The fundamental problem I have had to confront is that Walton is a ghost, and neither conventional nor cultural biography is particularly suitable for telling you about him. When I say that Walton is a ghost, I’m not just speaking metaphorically of his status as a dead person. I really do mean to suggest that he is a haunting ﬁgure. Walton provokes Americans to recall events that have been forgotten or suppressed out of shame over their weak allegiance to the ideals of democracy that supposedly deﬁne the nation. His experience puts the lie to platitudes about talent rewarded and faithful service to the nation acknowledged and appreciated. Walton prods us to revisit the American Century. Remembering Walton means acknowledging that for a sizeable portion of Americans, the “American Century” meant dislocation, dispossession, and discrimination, not peace, power, and prosperity—that Americans continue to export “democracy” when we have not realized a democratic society at home. Remembering Walton means telling a different kind of story about mass communication and foreign relations, one in which minorities were coworkers in the kingdom of culture, not mere stereotyped subjects of the white imagination. Remembering Walton means accepting “complex personhood”—that for someone like Walton writing publicity for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, forging panAfrican ties, joining the civil rights struggle, and facilitating the economic, military, and political penetration of Liberia, while seemingly contradictory and contrary to the widely admired work of known black activists and American nationalists, was simply being committed to progress at home and abroad and uncertain as to which of those strategies might bear fruit.6 In other words, Walton haunts us with stories that challenge American self-righteousness and invite collective transformative introspection. Implicitly, Walton poses the question: Why have you forgotten me? When I say that this is a ghost story, I’m not talking about the kind of eerie tales my friends and I used to tell one another on Halloween hayrides these and other such cultural biographies, see Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reﬂections on Microhistory and Biography,” 129–44. 6. For a particularly compelling scholarly approach to haunting ﬁgures, see Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.

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that left us shivering and squealing with creepy delight. You know the kind—about dead teenagers returning to life on prom night or crazy killers attacking adolescents fumbling with ﬁrst love on deserted country lanes. This ghost story combines elements of mystery and gothic horror. Like many stories of this type, narrated by a rational survivor of a haunting, this one attempts to explain the restlessness of Walton’s spirit. In piecing together the bits of evidence, I reveal what I have come to know about Walton’s life. But I can’t evade the horrors that he refused to name. Behind the façade of optimism and success are housed the histories of slavery, violence, denigration, greed, and exploitation that mar the outward appearance of democracy when the shutters are opened. The American gothic romances of the early nineteenth century examined the dark side of life, and as scholars like Teresa Goddu and others have shown, dark and light, black and white in the United States are inextricably bound up with anxiety about race. She writes, “American gothic literature criticizes America’s national myth of new-world innocence by voicing the cultural contradictions that undermine the nation’s claim to purity and equality.”7 Following in that tradition, I have located various intersections of race and haunting that expose just such cultural contradictions. Fairly early in the process of researching this book, I began to feel uneasy, but I could not then name what I was experiencing. By the time I recognized it as a haunting, I was in too deep to abandon my quest for the source of my disquietude. The initial pang, as I explain more fully later, had to do with my chagrin at not knowing of Walton. I have been reading, conducting research, and writing on turn-of-the-twentieth-century American cultural history for years. How could I have missed someone as inﬂuential as Walton? Other specialists, I assumed, knew his whole story, and I had a lot of catching up to do. Although rooted in mostly inaccurate assumptions, this anxious sense proved to be a powerful goad that eventually led to my recognition that there was much more to this story. At issue here is why Walton is a ghost, why he haunts America in the twenty-ﬁrst century, and how important parts of his story can be recovered. What makes this project compelling is that on the surface, Walton embodied many American ideals. His was a success story; he rose from 7. Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation, 10. For other insights into the racial aspects of the American gothic see J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, eds., Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race; and Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. I concluded that ghost stories essentially solve mysteries after reading selections from the following works: Bennett Cerf, ed., Famous Ghost Stories; and for contemporary work see Roger Weingarten, ed., Ghost Writing: Haunted Tales by Contemporary Writers.

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modest circumstances to wield considerable power in public life. He symbolized the favored version of the civil rights struggle as a purposeful acceptance of racial difference and positive interracial relations.8 Walton helped mobilize and facilitate Liberia’s cooperation as the United States lurched toward war in the 1940s, gaining access to crucial air and naval bases in Monrovia when the United States needed a friendly outpost on the west coast of Africa. He was, thus, a part of America’s “Greatest Generation,” who willingly took part in the “Good War.”9 He worked through the political system instead of against it. One could imagine Walton as a poster child for a gradualist, conservative movement toward racial equality, which, during the second half of the twentieth century, repeatedly urged that change could not take place overnight. Patience, conformity, and intergroup collaboration would be rewarded. So what’s missing? What’s not being said? Why hasn’t Walton’s story been told? Answers to these questions, as you might imagine, are neither simple nor direct, because they lie at the murky intersection of history and memory. Both history and memory trafﬁc in the past, but they bear an uneasy relationship to each other.10 Memory is suspect; history is authoritative. Memory is deeply personal and subjective; it arises spontaneously and takes on different coloration, depending on what prompted it to burst forth from the recesses of the mind. History changes, too, as new perspectives are brought to bear on past events, as new bodies of evidence are examined and deciphered, and as the needs of one generation give way to those of another. But the method is more systematic than spontaneous, and the narration typically begins at the beginning, bringing order to a mishmash of details. What follows is my attempt to combine the anecdotal quality of memory with the investigative instincts of the historian. I hope to introduce 8. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unﬁnished Struggle for Democracy, 4. Singh’s purpose is to recover a different, radical struggle for social justice, and he opens his narrative by showing the Martin Luther King Jr.–centered narrative against which he positions his account. He writes: “King’s democratic challenge, in other words, was powerful and recognizable insofar as it conformed to the retrospective illusion of shared national identity across time: appearing as ‘the fulﬁllment of a project’ and as the ‘completion of a destiny.’ As a new founding father, the mythic King allowed Americans not only to celebrate their progress into a more inclusive and tolerant people, but also to tell themselves this is who they always were.” 9. These are references to terms coined, respectively, by Tom Brokaw, America’s Greatest Generation; and Studs Terkel, The Good War. 10. A helpful introduction to the study of memory is Daniel Schacter’s Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. On the social nature of memory see Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. And for thoughtful reﬂections on historical research see Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History.

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you to Lester Walton by leading you along the path of my discovery, recalling key moments when I struggled to make sense of my cultural inheritance and of this man who has insinuated himself into my life. I also identify important markers of his presence and treat them as cues that bring forth a ﬂood of experience that allows us to recapture memories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a collective black memory of the Civil War as an emancipationist struggle and Walton’s knowledge of his family’s history as it was shaped by both bondage and freedom—that have persisted in spite of the lure of a more satisfying narrative of sectional reconciliation and national (white) unity in the American Century.11 It is, therefore, a form of life writing. But entwined in the story of Lester Walton and my coming to know him is another narrative strain. That strain consists of a series of reﬂections on the work of historians—on how historians seek access to an always elusive past and why, no matter the diligence of the scholar, the past sometimes refuses to give up all of its secrets.

11. For a superlative account of the competing memories of the Civil War, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

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Chapter 1 Lester and Me

I found Lester Walton while looking for someone else. In the early 1990s, I was working on a cultural biography of Scott Joplin, and research on his ﬁnal years led me to the New York Age. I had discovered how important a community of performers had been to the composer in Sedalia and St. Louis, Missouri; I wondered if he had similarly established himself in the rich musical and performance community in New York. I ﬁrst checked to see if the Age had carried a notice of his death. There it was on page one with additional commentary on page six, a section on musical and stage entertainers edited by Lester Walton. If Joplin’s death was front-page news, I decided, it was imperative to go back to his arrival in New York in 1907 to see how he had become a notable celebrity in ten years.1 Music and the Stage, as the section originally was known, ﬁrst appeared in February 1908, covering most of Joplin’s years in the city. It became an indispensable source of information on the composer, but its coverage didn’t help me immediately gauge Joplin’s status in the world of African American entertainment. The editor noted when Joplin published a new composition, carried advertisements for later hits, documented his involvement in the 1. See “Scott Joplin Dies of Mental Trouble,” New York Age, April 5, 1917, 1, col. 7; “Things Theatrical,” New York Age, April 5, 1917, 6, col. 1. Joplin died on April 1, 1917; since the Age was a weekly newspaper, the notice appeared late, but it was in fact in the very next issue after his death.

11

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Colored Vaudevillian Benevolent Association (C.V.B.A.), published an interview with the composer in 1913, and even reported when Joplin joined the black migration into Harlem by moving from 47th to 133rd Street. Indeed, in March 1908, the editor, about a month into his new position, wrote an article on Joplin’s intention to work on an opera, suggesting the possibility that the “retiring” Missourian might become an American Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, “who will prove to the public that the black man can compose other than ragtime music.”2 In subsequent years, however, the editor’s interest in Joplin seemed to cool. Articles with promising headlines about black composers and musicians did not mention Joplin. Other stars—Bert Williams, George and Aida Overton Walker, Bob Cole, and Rosamond Johnson—lit up the page. Comparing coverage of Joplin’s activities and achievements, I noticed that Joplin lacked the impressive training and contacts that the editor liked most to mention. I no longer remember when it happened, but one day, in a moment of frustration, I wondered aloud in the microﬁlm reading room, “Who is Lester Walton?” At that point, I was struck by the tremendous power and inﬂuence he commanded. For I had not conﬁned my reading to notices about Joplin. I had dipped into Walton’s weekly essays on show business, and I came to know whom he most admired and why. I learned about the careers of numerous musicians, actors, dancers, and comedians and the features of their acts that, according to Walton, drew adoring fans. It was clear from reading his essays, articles, editorial comments, and interviews with famous black performers that Walton saw show business as anything but frivolous. It was a serious site of the struggle for equality, respect, and full citizenship being waged by African Americans in Jim Crow’s America. Music and drama were not mere diversions as Walton wrote about them; it mattered a great deal what kinds of shows sprang from the creative imaginations of black producers and playwrights, how the race was represented on stage and in song lyrics, and what message was conveyed to all audiences about African American life. While Walton couldn’t exactly make or break a career, he certainly could control the terms of the discussion of success and failure in stage work. In the Age, Walton did what he could to drum up business for excellent shows and to steer readers away from what he deemed second-rate acts. I wasn’t convinced he had given Joplin his due, but I needed to know more about Walton before

2. “Composer of Ragtime Now Writing Grand Opera,” New York Age, March 5, 1908, 6, col. 4–5. For the notice of Joplin’s move, see “Theatrical Jottings,” New York Age, December 17, 1914, 6, col. 2. And for other references to the Age’s coverage of Joplin’s career, see Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune, chapter 6.

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I could evaluate and contextualize his on-again, off-again interest in the composer. That’s when the haunting began. Initially, I was embarrassed more than uneasy, because I had never heard of Walton. I was irritated that I would have to divert my attention from Joplin long enough to learn about Walton and ﬁgure out what his assessment of the composer meant. But Walton was always just beyond my reach. No matter how much I read, I only found pieces of his life. It was a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle but with some pieces turned wrong side up and some missing. While I wondered if he really was the talent broker I had imagined from reading his columns, I was convinced that he was much more than his cameo appearances in other books would lead one to believe. The more I learned about him, the less I understood why he was so elusive. I was drawn deeper and deeper into a story from which there was no easy escape. When I ﬁrst encountered Walton, I knew him only as a journalist. In a strange sense we were rivals from the beginning, struggling for control of the story of Scott Joplin. Walton had had his say on the pages of the Age and enjoyed the advantage of knowing Joplin. I had “critical distance,” the supposed advantage of the historian looking backward. But I was dependent on Walton and his columns for insights into the composer’s signiﬁcance. Our assessments of Joplin, however, did not match up. I was annoyed by Walton; I didn’t yet know that he would come to haunt me.

History and Subjectivity When Lester Walton was to me just a New York journalist editing a page devoted to Music and the Stage, I could account for his lack of appreciation for Joplin’s music in terms of regional and class differences. Joplin came from the Piney Woods of northeastern Texas; he was the son of former slaves, and he had a patchy education. His life’s journey from Texarkana to Sedalia to St. Louis and ﬁnally to New York (with a good deal of itinerancy in between) undoubtedly marked his speech patterns, his view of proper race relations, his music, and, more fundamentally, his way of being in the world. It also mirrored the experiences of the majority of African Americans, surviving the disruptions of slavery and civil war and seeking to become part of the “imagined community” of post-Reconstruction America. Walton’s prose revealed a good education, wide experience, and an insider’s knowledge of show business. As a good race man, Walton had to keep an eye on a talented black musician working on an opera so that he could give him his due if the opera actually materialized and made a hit, but did he

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privately chuckle at Joplin’s drawl, the plantation setting of Treemonisha, and his untidy appearance as evidence of his backward country ways? But it turned out that Walton was not a New Yorker by birth—he was born in St. Louis. His friends in the Gateway City, including Tom Turpin, Louis Chauvin, and Sam Patterson, were Joplin’s friends, too. Walton left St. Louis in 1906, just one year before Joplin, both seeking greener pastures in the world of African American entertainment beginning to blossom in New York City. It is not entirely clear what these parallels meant. Had they known each other in St. Louis (it’s hard to imagine that they did not)? Were they friends? Rivals? Was their arrival in New York within a year of one another mere coincidence? Once in New York, why hadn’t Walton used his pull to help a fellow St. Louisan? As co-owner and manager of the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, Walton could have produced Joplin’s opera—why had he refused, exposing Joplin to the public humiliation of a single performance of Treemonisha without proper costumes, sets, and musical accompaniment? What did he know about Joplin that isn’t apparent in extant sources and that might account for his lack of sympathy? Why does it matter what he thought about Joplin? In the end, I could answer only the last question: Walton’s opinion matters because he shaped the history of African American entertainment in the early 1900s. As editor of Music and the Stage, Walton chronicled and interpreted the rise and fall of African American performers, the debuts and closings of colored shows, and the artistic work of men and women largely excluded from so-called legitimate theaters. His columns offer rare glimpses into a world fraught with political and cultural importance. Walton did not labor alone at this task, but he, Sylvester Russell, Cyril Briggs, Romeo Dougherty, and Theophilus Lewis represented a small fraternity of black critics in the early decades of the twentieth century who wrote seriously about a world largely ignored by the critics and historians of the American stage.3 Like the men and women Priscilla Wald studied for Constituting Americans, Walton wrote the African American performance com3. The following histories written about American theater during Walton’s tenure at the New York Age mention nothing about Walton and say very little about African American activity on the stage: Arthur Hornblow, History of the Theatre in America: From Its Beginnings to the Present Time; Margaret G. Mayorga, A Short History of the American Theatre: Commentaries on Plays prior to 1920; Mary Caroline Crawford, The Romance of the American Theatre; and Brander Matthews, Rip Van Winkle Goes to the Play and Other Essays on Plays and Players. The following works, written later by scholars of the theater, do little to jog the nation’s memory of black performance and criticism: C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama; and Howard Taubman, The Making of the American Theatre. Two notable exceptions to later work on the theater do take up the subject of African American performers, plays, and at least make

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munity into existence, contesting the prevailing narratives about national culture.4 For reasons unknown today, Walton decided that Joplin did not ﬁt comfortably in his interpretation of the role black artistic endeavor played in advancing the cause of justice and equality for African Americans in the United States. Like most historians, Walton seamlessly joined cool objectivity with personal investment and hope. As a critic, Walton did not maintain much distance between himself and the men and women whose performances he critiqued, praised, or panned. One of his ﬁrst acts as editor was to open a “Mail Box for Performers,” which would accept mail for entertainers when they were on the road or in the city, a service which prompted regular contact between critic and performer.5 He also helped organize two societies for the advancement of black entertainers—the Frogs and the C.V.B.A.—and held ofﬁces in both. The aim of the Frogs, founded in July 1908, was to promote social intercourse between the representative members of the Negro theatrical profession and to those connected directly or indirectly with art, literature, music, scientiﬁc, and liberal professions and the patrons of the arts: for the creation of a library relating especially to the history of the Negro, and the record of all worthy achievements and the collection and preservation of all folk-lore, whether that of song. . . , of pictures and bills of the plays in which the Negro has participated.6

Walton always attended and occasionally performed in the “Frolic of the Frogs,” an annual gala gathering and evening of entertainment sponsored by the group. Not quite a year later, in June 1909, Walton helped organize the C.V.B.A., whose motto was: We hope some day To spread our name and fame all over the whole creation. Onward we march with our banners ﬂying gay. Be loyal to each other, always love and help a brother, Is the motto of the C.V.B.A. In this organization a relationship between Walton and Joplin can be seen as they served on the same committees and attended entertainments put use of Walton’s criticism. See Edith J. R. Isaacs, The Negro in the American Theatre; and Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre. 4. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. 5. “Mail Box for Performers,” New York Age, February 6, 1908, 6, col. 6. 6. “Well Known Performers Organize the ‘Frogs,’” New York Age, July 9, 1908, 6, col. 2.

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on by the C.V.B.A.7 For a time, Walton co-owned and managed the Lafayette Theater, which became an important venue for black performance in Harlem. In this endeavor he helped make the history that constituted his historical narrative. Walton also wrote lyrics for Ernest Hogan, the self-styled “Unbleached American,” Will Marion Cook, and Luckyeth Roberts. In all these ways, Walton blurred the lines separating critic, celebrant, participant, and historian.8 Yet in the Music and the Stage section of the Age, Walton showed no mercy toward performers—many of whom he counted as friends—whose comic routines, vocal stylings, or sartorial choices conﬂicted with his sense of what was funny, sounded good, or might reinforce harmful racial stereotypes. Walton’s review of Ernest Hogan’s The Oyster Man typiﬁes his early commentary in that it gives encouragement and praise in the opening paragraphs before tearing into the deﬁciencies of the production. Carita Day’s singing had improved, he noted, but she had a tendency to be too “stagey.” The plot lacked originality and indulged in both melodrama and “a little too much of gun and razor play.” While Hogan’s performance saved The Oyster Man from utter mediocrity, he, too, should continue to work on his acting.9 When Aida Overton Walker introduced her version of the Salome dance into Bandanna Land in 1908, Walton devoted more than a column to explaining why this decision was to be regretted. Her interpretation of the dance that was then the rage in New York paled in comparison to Gertrude Hoffman’s, Eva Tanguay’s, and Isadora Duncan’s versions. He urged Walker to return to her strength, which was to perform “dances of her own creation,” because “there is nothing like being original.”10 Walton panned Cole and Johnson’s Shoo Fly 7. “Motto of the C.V.B.A.,” New York Age, January 6, 1910, 6, col. 4; “Colored Vaudevillans (sic) Organize,” New York Age, June 10, 1909, 6, col. 1–3; “New C.V.B.A. Committees,” New York Age, June 6, 1912, 6, col. 3; and “C.V.B.A. Entertainment,” New York Age, August 17, 1911, 6, col. 1–2. For Walton’s preliminary history of the two organizations see “Clubs Elect Ofﬁcers,” New York Age, May 26, 1910, 6, col. 1–2. 8. A contract for four songs—words by Lester Walton, music by Ernest Hogan—with Joseph W. Stern and Company, dated September 7, 1903, can be found in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 6/1; Walton’s collaboration with Will Marion Cook is documented in two letters: Walton to Claude A. Barnett, December 26, 1933, in Claude A. Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society (hereinafter CABPA), box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927–1934, and Will Von Tilzer to Walton, September 21, 1948, LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 6/4. See also “Negro Songs,” New York Age, December 9, 1915, 6, col. 1–2. Walton’s lyrics for songs written by Roberts can be found in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 6/5. 9. “‘The Oyster Man’ Scores Success,” New York Age, December 19, 1907, 6, col. 1–2. 10. “‘Salome,’” New York Age, August 27, 1908, 6, col. 1–2. Four years later, Walker performed Salome at Hammerstein’s theater, and Walton offered a more sanguine appraisal.

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Regiment because he felt there was “not enough comedy,” “the female cast is not strong,” and “the situations as a whole do not bear the earmarks of a Broadway show.” He thought the show belonged in a second-class theater, where audiences were more easily entertained.11 Bert Williams’s Mr. Lode of Koal contained too much dialogue in the ﬁrst act and “several characters that could be easily eliminated.” Walton believed that “two additional catchy songs would help make the production one that can vie with any musical show in the country.”12 Walton’s criticisms, while pointed and speciﬁc, were never vicious or personal attacks. He was trying to shape as well as record the history of African American cultural production. Artee Felicita Young’s 1980 dissertation on Walton’s career as a drama critic credits him with being the “ﬁrst black writer to pay serious and consistent attention to the world of black theatrical art,” a claim that might well be disputed. But her argument that Walton “saw the relationship between theatrical performances and observed that there was a lack of continuity and an absence of consistent standards for black artists,” goes a long way toward explaining the multiple roles he played as editor of Music and the Stage. Keeping close company with the likes of Bert Williams, widely acknowledged as the “funniest man in America,” Scott Joplin, touted as the “King of Ragtime Writers,” and Aida Overton Walker, seen as the originator of the cakewalk dance craze that swept two continents, Walton recognized the great talent that could be found in the African American community, and his columns turned the spotlight on those gifted individuals. At the same time, the inability of those musicians, dancers, actors, and comedians to join the mainstream of American culture had to be addressed. Clearly, racism posed the greatest challenge, but racist thinking could not be eliminated until greater understanding existed among people of all races in the United States. Walton believed that the stage could be a force for dispelling misunderstanding of African Americans, but only if the performances were both excellent and true to the variety of African American experience in the United States.13

11. “Two Theatrical Sacriﬁces,” New York Age, August 22, 1907, 5, col. 2. Another review, after changes had been made, was generally more positive but added new concerns about speciﬁc numbers and the poor use of makeup. See “Shoo Fly Regiment,” New York Age, October 31, 1907, 2, col. 5. 12. “‘Mr. Lode of Koal,’ A Broadway Show,” New York Age, September 16, 1909, 6, col. 1–2. 13. Young, “Lester A. Walton,” 1–4. Karen Sotiropoulos, in Staging Race: Black Performance in Turn-of-the-Century America, draws heavily on Walton but argues against Young’s view of him as the ﬁrst or as the most insightful of the black critics at work in the early twentieth century.

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Deciding what was “excellent” and what was “true” rather than stereotypical required making judgment calls. And Walton willingly made them according to values that he hoped were widely shared, but which were, in many ways, evidence of the position he was staking out in the debate among African Americans over how to make social and political advances in the nation. Excellence demanded treating performance as a professional endeavor that involved study, preparation, and practice. Walton held up as examples George Walker practicing his strut in front of a mirror and Harry Fiddler observing other comedians to learn new techniques. He quoted Aida Overton Walker’s advice to aspiring female performers to study the stage, cultivate their abilities, and “to do the work that is required.” Similarly, when Harrison Stewart was selected to substitute for Ernest Hogan in The Oyster Man during the star’s illness, Walton recorded Stewart’s motto for success: Though our professional road looks muddy, Let us never cease to study. You try hard and so will I To be headliners before we die.14 While tinged with late-Victorian ideas about individual striving and selfhelp, Walton’s deﬁnition of excellence was tempered by consciousness of the national market in which black entertainers worked. Artistic and skillful performance, which made the difﬁcult appear effortless, was critical in this context, because it made for a more reliable cultural product. The objective of performance, Walton argued repeatedly, was to please the audience, and that was possible only “if you deliver the goods.”15 By referring to an act as “the goods,” Walton treated performance like a commodity and subjected it to a standard deﬁned by market imperatives and consumerist thinking. Like consumers of manufactured goods, audiences were drawn to novelty and ﬁne quality, so Walton urged black performers to differentiate their acts from those of others and give audiences something they would want. In 1908 he wrote a lengthy review of an African American dance team, the Brittons, who had been hired by the Hammersteins to open for a white act. Walton reported that after just two performances, the Brit14. “The Need of Preparation,” New York Age, July 18, 1912, 6, col. 1–2; Aida Overton Walker, “Opportunities the Stage Offers Intelligent and Talented Women,” New York Age, December 24, 1908, Dramatic Section, 1, col. 2–5; and “Harrison Stewart,” New York Age, July 9, 1908, 6, col. 1–2. 15. “Two Theatrical Sacriﬁces” and “Always Imagining,” New York Age, December 3, 1908, 6, col. 1–2.

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tons were promoted to the top of the bill, where they remained through the rest of their contract. Here was a valuable “object lesson,” he wrote. “After all it is up to the performer as to where he shall be assigned on a bill. For if he ‘delivers the goods’ the public will show that he is in demand and the management will be compelled to give him the proper consideration.” In this case, the key to the Brittons’ success, Walton believed, was the novelty of their act. “You can’t go to sleep in the theatrical business. It is a case of study and practice all the time so you can ‘spring’ something new on the public, which is always on the alert for novelties.”16 Embedded in Walton’s analysis of excellent performance was a demand for professional demeanor that drew on a cluster of imperatives that valorized market relations—punctuality, respect for the sanctity of contracts, ﬁscal responsibility, and steady work habits. These markers of professionalism, all having to do with money and time, reveal Walton’s view of the realities of modernity—show business was national in scope and could not be conducted efﬁciently or proﬁtably without a shared commitment to and language for contractual obligation. From day one, Walton urged black performers to adopt better business methods, which made for rather unusual commentary on a page supposedly devoted to entertainment. “To make a contract and then keep it, is a rule that should be observed by everyone,” he insisted. “If a performer makes a contract and subsequently ﬁnds that he has been out-pointed, he should bow to the inevitable and accept conditions gracefully. He has been taught a lesson and should proﬁt by his experience.”17 In the aftermath of the 1907 stock market crash, Walton urged entertainers to cultivate the desire to “‘go big on the stage,’ which is justiﬁable and professional,” but to avoid overspending off the stage, “which is idiotic, absurd and unwise.” Indeed, he wrote a feature on John B. Nail, a successful businessman, in an effort to persuade African American entertainers to save money during fat times and lean.18 Between his informal lectures in the Age and his role in organizing and deﬁning the goals of the C.V.B.A. and the Frogs, Walton conveyed the idea that African American entertainers needed to establish, disseminate, and enforce professional standards even as they cultivated artistic endeavor and commitment to racial solidarity.19 These admonitions stand out in Walton’s columns—all the more because they seem oddly out of place. I was prepared for criticism that 16. “The Brittons,” New York Age, April 16, 1908, 6, col. 1–2. 17. “Morris Letter Causes Comment,” New York Age, February 13, 1908, 6, col. 1–2. 18. “The Performer and the Economy,” New York Age, March 26, 1908, 6, col. 1–2. 19. For Walton’s understanding of the goals of both organizations, see “Colored Vaudevillans (sic) Organize,” New York Age, June 10, 1909, 6, col. 1–3.

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focused on ragged performances, miscues on stage, songs and sketches that did not quite hit the mark, or acts with questionable content. But I wasn’t prepared for these lectures on best business practices. Yet before long I recognized them as trademarks of Walton’s journalistic style that made his voice recognizable anywhere. Indeed, they eventually helped me situate his thought in the larger African American struggle in these years. An unmistakable strain of self-help ideology runs through Walton’s commentary—especially in the ﬁrst couple of years of his editorship of the entertainment section of the Age. Not only did he advocate individual striving, but he also urged the African American community to support productions put on and businesses run by its members. But with a few notable exceptions, Walton refused to condone social separation of the races. One of the most jarring exceptions appeared in a 1908 review of Cole and Johnson’s The Red Moon. He praised the team for having “at last learned . . . that they must give the public what it wants and not what they think the public should have.” Comparing The Red Moon to their earlier Shoo Fly Regiment, Walton predicted greater ﬁnancial success for the former even though the latter “told a much better story.” The difference between the two was that Shoo Fly Regiment featured Negro soldiers, which many whites did not care to see, and The Red Moon found other ways to “show the race to an advantage.”20 In 1917 and 1918, Walton would reverse himself by railing against the Committee on Public Information and the white-run movie houses that refused to acknowledge the role played by Negro soldiers in the Great War, omitting them from newsreels or including only insulting images of black troops. But in 1908, eager to see black acts make it in show business, Walton saw no harm in bowing to white tastes, even though this position ran counter to his insistence on representing African Americans in all walks of life in all their regional and class varieties. In all of his roles—historian, critic, participant, and celebrant—Walton most fundamentally grappled with racial representation. His most rousing and inspiring columns picked apart the logic of racism and passionately asserted the fundamental error of racial determinism that fueled the white public’s desire for the “Stage Negro.” Here Walton parted company with Booker T. Washington and his limited aspirations for the race. Not only did millions of African Americans live outside the rural South, they also occupied positions in the professions; they worked in ofﬁces, as entrepreneurs, and as skilled tradesmen. When he called for entertainers to

20. “ ‘The Red Moon,’ ” New York Age, September 10, 1908, 6, col. 1–3.

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delineate black characters on stage, Walton meant for them to present an array of possibilities, not a single type. He did not deny the existence of rural black types, as a 1908 interview with Bert Williams makes clear. Walton applauded Williams’s and Walker’s “determination to stick to the Negro character as they had found it in different parts of the South, where they spent nearly a year, studying the colored people with whom they supposedly came into contact, to gain the knowledge of portraying the Southern darky with that true and natural effect.”21 Walton’s use of the term darky, which he later would discontinue and would urge others to drop as well, should not distract attention from the point of this piece—the recognition that Williams, a Californian, and Walker, a Kansan, had to study the idiom, speech patterns, interactions, and cultural life of African Americans in the South in order to capture ways of being that did not come naturally to them. Walton also celebrated the important work other colored shows were doing “to offset all misrepresentations made by the white actors playing Negro characters” by creating middle-class characters as well as working people, rural types as well as urban, fashionably clad men and women as well as ragged people on the fringes of black communities.22 In 1917, when an all-black cast performed three playlets written by Ridgely Torrence, Walton praised the playwright and the cast for having created scenes that “faithfully portrayed types of Negro life,” from an old rural Negro woman ﬁercely proud of her racial purity to her citiﬁed great granddaughter raped by her white employer, from a modest working man and the doctor who owns the house he and his family rent, to Simon, the Cyrenian man who bore the cross of Jesus of Nazareth.23 He hoped that the production could work against race prejudices hardened by stereotype and social segregation. “As [the white man] does not visit our homes, our schools or our churches in large numbers, the stage must be employed to visualize Negro life and point out to the white American the inconsistencies of color prejudice.”24

21. “The Secret of Williams and Walker’s Success,” New York Age, February 27, 1908, 6, col. 2. 22. “The Two Stage Forces,” New York Age, December 24, 1908, 6, col. 1–2. 23. Lester A. Walton, “Negro Actors Make Debut in Drama at Garden Theatre; Given Most Cordial Welcome,” New York Age, April 12, 1917, 1, col. 1. For a fuller analysis of this landmark performance and references to its signiﬁcance to two key African American intellectuals, see Curtis, First Black Actors on the Great White Way; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of the Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America; and James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan. 24. “The ‘Colored Players,’” New York Age, April 12, 1917, 6, col. 1.

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Walton’s extensive commentary on the black actors’ performance expressed a wary hopefulness that Emilie Hapgood’s decision to produce the three plays would lead to a renewed commitment to enlist the stage in the campaign for political and social equality—wary, because the recent past had not been particularly good for African American performers. In fact, in the years following the deaths of black stars like Ernest Hogan, George Walker, and Bob Cole in 1910 and 1911, Walton had turned his attention increasingly to events and issues offstage that he thought might account for the struggle of a new generation of African American performers to achieve popularity and professional success. He devoted more of his columns to segregation in the theaters and to individuals who challenged Jim Crow practices in the courts. Like his “muckraking” contemporaries, Walton used his position as a journalist to expose injustice and to educate readers. He thus quoted from an 1895 New York law, the Malby Act, to explain why segregation in theaters should be challenged on legal grounds, and he exposed the racist attitudes in Harry Von Tilzer’s music publishing house by quoting Von Tilzer’s manager, Max Winslow, complaining “‘that entirely too many spades come into the ofﬁce.’”25 Moreover, beginning in 1913, Walton began a crusade to change the prevailing journalistic practice of not capitalizing “Negro.” While some of the work took place behind the scenes, with letters to the Associated Press and editors of major white dailies, it also involved his own practice of capitalizing Negro in order to equate it with other ethnic/racial designations such as Indian, Filipino, Malaysian, and Jew, all of which were routinely capitalized. He also chided professional colleagues who proclaimed themselves the “fearless champions of the common people’s rights” but ignored unjust treatment of African Americans. “Race prejudice,” he concluded, “indeed must be an aggravated afﬂiction of the worst sort—a disease which makes one blind and totally unconscious of fair play and a square deal.”26 A leitmotif of Walton’s columns was the assertion of African American citizenship. He invested serious political purpose in show business and 25. “Sues under the Malby Act,” New York Age, March 24, 1910, 6, col. 1; and “More Publishers Drawing Line,” New York Age, February 9, 1911, 6, col. 1. For a small sample of these kinds of reports from 1909 to 1911, see “Better Accommodations for Colored Performers,” New York Age, September 30, 1909, 6, col. 1–2; Negroes in New York Theatres,” New York Age, November 18, 1909, 6, col. 1–2; “A Broadway Hold-up,” New York Age, March 3, 1910, 6, col. 1–2; “Another Charge of Theatre Discrimination,” New York Age, March 10, 1910, 6, col. 5; “Is the Broadway Theatre Drawing Color Line?” New York Age, March 10, 1910, 6, col. 4; “Trouble at the Victoria Theatre,” New York Age, March 17, 1910, 6, col. 1; “Discrimination Cases in Court,” New York Age, May 5, 1910, 6, col. 1; and “Another Theatre Manager Fined,” New York Age, November 23, 1911, 6, col. 1–2. 26. “A Sin of Omission,” New York Age, February 6, 1913, 6, col. 1.

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offered commentary that presented an alternative narrative of earlytwentieth-century American development. The ofﬁcial story acknowledged neither the gap between the ideal of democracy and egalitarianism and the reality of race-based disfranchisement, dispossession, violence, and unequal treatment nor the many accomplishments of people of color that contested the prevailing acceptance of African Americans as an inherently inferior group. In a 1912 column he pointed out that the race question is only incidental to our white writers, but it is quite consequential to all writers of color. I sometimes wish I could write articles pertaining to the theatre which did not savor so much of the color question; but then, if colored writers had to drop the race discussion there would not be much need for colored newspapers, and I would be forced to return to my ﬁrst love—the daily—where the city editor instructs you, if the parties involved happen to be colored, “to write a few lines only.” Often you are told, “You’d better not use it,” meaning the story.27

It struck me as I read this passage (and many others like it) that Walton’s columns attempted to make visible experiences and people all too easily rendered invisible in “ofﬁcial” stories about the nation. And whether he editorialized on subjects related to entertainment or access to theaters and the stage or turned his columns over to professional entertainers wishing to explain their vision of the political signiﬁcance of the stage, Walton gave African Americans a voice and a venue for speaking themselves into existence. The fact that white critics in the city occasionally commented on his articles suggests that some men and women outside of Harlem actually heard.28 This intrepid advocate for African American artistry, gadﬂy, and eloquent “race man” was the Lester Walton I ﬁrst encountered while looking for someone else. This brief gloss of his ideas, as he expressed them in the New York Age, represents mostly a ﬁrst impression, and like all ﬁrst impressions, its representativeness was not entirely certain. Because of the way Walton insinuated himself into my research on Scott Joplin, I did not read his columns systematically until later. Even after a closer reading of his

27. “The ‘Follies of 1912,’” New York Age, October 24, 1912, 6, col. 1. 28. There are numerous examples of Walton’s inﬂuence on other newspapers and critics. See, for example, “ ‘World’ Discontinues Use of ‘Darkies,’” New York Age, June 29, 1918, 1, col. 5; “White Critics Answer the Age,” New York Age, May 20, 1909, 6, col. 1–2; “Musical America Speaks for Lyricist,” New York Age, April 27, 1918, 6, col. 2–3; “Why, Oh Why, Mr. Kaufman?” New York Age, January 12, 1918, 6, col. 1–2; and “Stage Jones on the Negro,” New York Age, October 10, 1912, 6, col. 1–2.

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early-twentieth-century journalism, Walton’s ideas are not readily accessible. Unlike his white contemporaries in the ﬁelds of journalism and drama criticism, Walton never published collections of his best essays nor did he pen a memoir in which he summed up the main thrust of his analysis of the world of African American art and entertainment. No one published his correspondence, except for a few letters that appear in the published correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois and Woodrow Wilson. Although he spent much of his later life involved in politics and public life, he never ran for ofﬁce, in which context he would have been expected to clarify his position on matters of social and political consequence. Walton did not make it easy to plumb his intellectual depths. I would not appreciate until much later how well he guarded his secrets. Yet for all of this hedging, I have to confess to a sense of kinship with Walton’s work as a “historian.” Even as he was chronicling the weekly endeavors of African American entertainers, making a written record to which later generations have turned for information on what happened, Walton inserted interpretive biographies of men and women he deemed important. They were traditional biographical sketches that provided personal journeys to account for present-day success. That the subjects were people with whom he had relationships may seem to undercut his objective authority with subjective complications. But even professional historians, well-schooled in the conventions of the craft, typically write about subjects that matter to them. In spite of the detached stance most historians assume, they select the subjects, the modes of analysis, and the interpretation. The epistemological reality of historical writing is that it is “ﬁction”—as one particularly astute scholar deﬁned it, “something that never did happen in the way it comes to be represented.”29 Historians, though not dissembling yet still fashioning a story, are profoundly implicated in what they write, whether they acknowledge it or not. Just as curiosity gave way to mild annoyance with this proliﬁc critic, whose assessment of Joplin seemed inexplicably to differ from mine, irritation eventually gave ground to admiration. Here was a man who balanced appreciation of the entertainment value of individual performances and major productions with consciousness of the politics of art. Although not identiﬁed by him, Walton embodied Louis Filler’s muckraking journalist as a “crusader” determined to expose the obstacles to fulﬁlling America’s democratic promise.30 I had to know more. How had Walton 29. Steedman, Dust, 154. 30. Louis Filler, The Muckrakers: Crusaders for American Liberalism. Filler devoted a chapter, “Up from Slavery,” to post-Reconstruction conditions for African Americans.

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come to assume this position on the New York Age; what qualiﬁed him to impose his judgments on stage performance? How long had he remained on the scene, and had his later work moved in new critical directions? And another question continued to gnaw at the back of my mind: Why have I never heard of Lester Walton?

Missing Person Had it not been for Artee Felicita Young’s 1980 dissertation on Lester Walton as a black theater critic, I might not have pursued this project. Near the beginning of the study she writes: “A sketch of Walton’s career will show the increased breadth and scope of his concern. Through his interest in the theatre he became interested in the drama, which literally focuses on human relationships. But Walton was inevitably frustrated in his attempts to change the bedrock of American prejudice via the theatre. He became a politician, and tried to accomplish there what he could not succeed in doing as part of the theatre world.”31 While Young focused almost exclusively on his criticism, insisting that hers was not a full biography and would not attend to Walton’s political activities, she did provide a compact summary of his career after he abandoned theater criticism. It was an impressive record that linked him to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, New York mayor Robert F. Wagner, and the Democratic National Committee.32 Even armed with these leads, I found so little in print on Walton that I wondered if the reason I had never heard of him was that he had left little impression on public life. I followed her footnotes to Supplement Seven of the Dictionary of American Biography, where Irving Dilliard’s sketch of Walton reported that no biography had been written and that he had based his entry on a New York Times obituary, a handful of articles published by Walton, a 1955 Negro History Bulletin essay on his career as a diplomat, and a brief entry in the Negro Heritage Library. Except for the last of these sources, no scholarly attention apparently had been focused on his life and work by the mid-1960s. Yet the disjuncture between the scholarly silence and the list of accomplishments noted by Dilliard was staggering. A black He argues that “It was the Northern reformers who carried the brunt of constructive work after the turn of the century, and the muckraking organs gave them their vehicle of expression” (227–78). With one or two exceptions, Filler identiﬁed white writers as the most important of the northern reformers. And, not surprisingly, Walton does not ﬁgure in this study at all. 31. Young, “Lester A. Walton,” 8. 32. Ibid., 46–50.

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writer on a white St. Louis daily by the age of twenty, an aspiring playwright who settled for writing drama criticism in the New York Age, the publicity director for the black division of the Democratic National Committee in 1924, 1928, and 1932, a diplomat assigned to Liberia from 1935 to 1946, a founder of the Negro Actors Guild and the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers, and a member of the New York City Commission on Intergroup Relations (later Human Rights)—Walton played all of these roles, any one of which could offer insight into major developments in twentieth-century America. Moreover, these are subjects—the color line and race relations in the twentieth century, the emergence of professional black expressive culture on the eve of the Jazz Age, the realignment of the two major political parties, U.S. policy in Africa, and the post-1945 civil rights movement—of great signiﬁcance to scholars in many ﬁelds. Walton is, at best, a shadowy ﬁgure in the histories that have been written; from most, he’s a missing person.33 33. I have already alluded to the work by scholars of African American performance that makes extensive use of Walton’s commentary. This note, unlike most, will say less about the sources that cite or discuss Walton and focus on studies that leave him out. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, and Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, offer competing analyses of the efforts to dislodge African Americans from the Republican Party in the middle decades of the twentieth century, but neither does much more than mention Walton as the director of publicity for the Colored Democrats. Similarly, Robert Vann’s biographer says nothing about Walton or about Vann’s and Walton’s love-hate relationship through the 1920s and 1930s—see Andrew Buni, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism. Not surprisingly, celebratory accounts of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, like Alfred Lief’s The Firestone Story: A History of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, say nothing about Walton’s relationship with Harry S. Firestone Jr. and Sr. as an ally in Liberia or as a public relations expert who worked for them in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, career diplomats who worked with Walton in the 1930s and 1940s have published autobiographies in which they discuss Liberian affairs but never refer to the U.S. minister. See for example, Ellis O. Briggs, Farewell to Foggy Bottom: The Recollections of a Career Diplomat; and Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle. Dewberry, “Black Actors Unite” is the most comprehensive scholarly study of the Negro Actors Guild of America and the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers, but Dewberry relegates Walton to a minor role in the two organizations, even though Walton actually founded the CCNP. In his study of the controversial radio and television program, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Melvin Patrick Ely brieﬂy discusses the role the CCNP played in trying to get the networks to be more responsive to the tastes and demands of black viewers, but he does not discuss Walton’s behind-the-scenes work. See The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, chapter 10. Joe William Trotter Jr., From a Raw Deal to a New Deal: African Americans, 1929– 1945; and Vincent Harding, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, We Changed the World: African Americans, 1945–1970, are two volumes in the Young Oxford History of African Americans series edited by two of the most inﬂuential scholars in the ﬁeld. Yet neither of these books includes Walton’s contributions to the struggle for equal rights between 1929 and 1970, the years during which Walton was at the height of his inﬂuence. A

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How did a ﬁgure as active, well connected, and talented as he fade from view? His race may have had something to do with his absence. Certainly many biographies of African Americans (and other racial or ethnic minorities, for that matter) betray the same pattern. In a biography of James Milton Turner, Gary R. Kremer writes: “Turner was, unquestionably the dominant black political ﬁgure in Missouri during the generation of the Civil War. And yet, slightly more than a century later, he is little remembered by historians and unknown to everyday Missourians, even those whose political party he once served so faithfully.”34 Similarly Reid Badger identiﬁes “a general pattern of neglect with which Americans, white and black, of the 1920s and after tended to treat the accomplishments of Jim Europe, and indeed, most of the members of his ragtime generation of African-American musical pioneers.”35 Indeed, the “King of Ragtime Writers,” Scott Joplin, was cloaked in obscurity for ﬁve decades after his death in 1917 before being recovered by musicologists and musicians.36 Joanne V. Gabbin registers the same concern in her 1985 study of Sterling Brown: “[O]ne of the greatest paradoxes of American literature is that Sterling Brown, who has done as much as any one man to identify the foundations of the Black aesthetic tradition, has been so little studied.”37 In Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas observes that unlike the vast majority of the white cultural and literary ﬁgures who populate her study of Manhattan in the 1920s, “there are no full-length reliable biographies of the most important writers, organizers, and performers of the Harlem Renaissance.”38 Jeffrey B. Ferguson’s recent study of George S. Schuyler, a prominent African American journalist and self-proclaimed black conservative, wrestles with the problem of “why his story has not received more detailed academic attention.” Like Walton, Schuyler deﬁed easy categorization and refused to conform to other African Americans’ expectations of race leadership.39 more focused study, Martha Biondi’s To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, assigns a negligible role to the Commission on Intergroup Relations-cum-Commission on Human Rights in the struggle and as a result does not mention Walton’s work as a commissioner from 1955 to 1964. 34. Gary R. Kremer, James Milton Turner and the Promise of America, 6. 35. Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe, 228. 36. Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune, 2–5. 37. Joanne V. Gabbin, Sterling Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, 7. 38. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, 87. In the years since Douglas completed the research for this important study, some of the work she called for has been done. Still, compared to the forests devoted to 1920s white ﬁgures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, the work on African American writers and artists is still quite small. 39. Jeffrey B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance, 3. Schuyler’s attack on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964 marginalized him

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Walton himself knew something of the fragility of collective memory. In response to a letter from Louis Sobol in 1956 asking Walton to nominate performers for inclusion in a “Broadway Hall of Fame,” Walton expressed his astonishment that Sobol had excluded Bert Williams, Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, and Rosamond Johnson, all “acclaimed scintillating Broadway stars by press and public. It is sincerely hoped memory of their respective successes also will be kept green.”40 Now Walton joins his old pals from New York as a memory no longer green. But to attribute this state of affairs to race isn’t completely satisfying, or better said, it is an incomplete beginning. What is it, exactly, about racial identiﬁcation that turns movers and shakers into missing persons? It’s not so much that people forget but that they fail to remember—and according to cognitive psychologists, there is a difference between the two. Remembering is an individual function, but it can’t be reduced to individuals, for part of the socialization process involves learning and appropriating culturally constructed categories by which we distinguish one kind of person, subject, or concept from another. In the course of experience, individual elements are stored by categories until some cue prompts us to connect discrete elements. Metaphorically, we rummage through our mental ﬁling cabinets in response to these cues in order to “remember” by piecing together a past experience. A certain perfume reminds you of your ﬁrst kiss; a place name takes you back to a youthful adventure. Sometimes in our haste to reconstruct a past moment, we latch onto details from adjacent mental folders and construct a story that is jumbled or inaccurate and, when called on it, might claim to have “forgotten” exactly how an event occurred. But cues for one category rarely take you to another. This is where race contributes to amnesia—especially in the United States, where the “color line” constitutes one of the key cultural sorting mechanisms.41

from the civil rights movement and obscured the importance of his writing before World War II. Although friendly correspondents, Schuyler and Walton took very different approaches to the problem of challenging racism, discrimination, and social injustice. 40. Walton to Louis Sobol, February 7, 1956, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 14. 41. Obviously, this is a nonexpert explanation of an extremely complicated physiological and psychological process. The following works have shaped my understanding of the memory-making process: Schacter, Searching for Memory; Casey, Remembering; and Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind. Of these, Schacter’s is the most helpful, for he synthesizes a vast body of periodical literature in psychology that is focused on such problems as “ﬂashbulb” memory, tainted memories, the role of stereotyping in cataloging stimuli, and the physiology of a “normal” brain. While he does take up problems that result in amnesia, he is more generally interested in how ordinary human beings make sense of their lives through encounters with the environment and frequent revisiting of

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Consider the example of Bert Williams. When critics or fellow performers were asked about Bert Williams, the universal appraisal was that he was the “funniest man in America.” Theatre Magazine in 1903, for example, asserted that “Bert Williams has long enjoyed the reputation of being a vastly funnier man than any white comedian now on the American Stage.” When his partner, George Walker, died in 1910, and Williams was hired by Florenz Ziegfeld to perform in his famed “Follies,” Williams was touted by the New York World as having “more real talent than all the rest of the cast combined,” and the New York Times insisted that “there is no more clever low comedian on our stage today.” Carl Van Vechten and Heywood Broun, writing years later, praised his talents as a comedic actor, the former reporting that Eleanora Duse considered Williams “America’s ﬁnest actor,” and the latter ranking him above Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson in terms of the “subtlety” of his humor.42 In each of these cases, the cue was “Bert Williams,” and it brought to mind images of a howlingly funny comedian. By contrast, articles purporting to report on America’s funniest actors never mention him. Two cues—“Bert Williams” and “American Comedians”—lead to two separate sites of memory. Despite constitutional guarantees, the color line separated white American citizens from racial and ethnic minorities whose citizenship was provisional at best, and whether consciously or not, Americans generally stored data in segregated mental ﬁles. This process of remembering made Bert Williams a missing person, too. And his example is instructive for thinking about the past and history writing. Without some prior knowledge of the “funniest man in America,” the scholar who set out to write a history of American comedy at the turn of the twentieth century and relied only on the bibliographic cue of “American Comedians” to ﬁnd articles or books from that time might end up consulting only sources from which Williams is absent. The resulting history would reproduce the race thinking and cultural categorizing of another time, unwittingly, perhaps, making it a part of our own. the past. Casey’s work usefully distinguishes casual reminiscing from purposeful remembering. Minsky’s work is more far-ranging in that he is interested in the way minds work. As a scholar in the ﬁeld of artiﬁcial intelligence, he is particularly intrigued by the possibility of understanding human mental processes more fully in order to apply those insights to the creation of “intelligent” machines. 42. “The Negro on the Stage,” Theatre Magazine (April 1903), quoted in Frederick W. Bond, The Negro and the Drama, 49; The New York World and New York Times articles are quoted in “Bert Williams Feature of the Follies of 1910,” New York Age, June 23, 1910, 6, col. 1–2; Carl Van Vechten, “The Negro Theatre,” In the Garret, 312–13; Broun is quoted in Isaacs, The Negro in the American Theatre, 41; for other examples of his fame see Mabel Rowland, Bert Williams: Son of Laughter; A Symposium Tribute to the Man and to His Work; and Curtis, First Black Actors on the Great White Way, 28–30.

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In Walton’s case, race undoubtedly plays a role in excluding him from responses to cues like “Muckraker” or “American Diplomat.” But how do we explain the fact that prompts like “Black Democrats” or “Civil Rights Worker” result in the same failure to remember Walton? The simplest answer is that many of his professional endeavors took place behind the scenes, leaving to others the public spotlight that made them—not Walton—memorable. His articles in the St. Louis dailies, which appear without bylines, provide obvious evidence of this possibility, but even his other journalistic efforts contributed to his invisibility. As a music and drama critic, Walton was a celebrant; the stars of stage, screen, and concert hall about whom he wrote were the celebrities. Walton helped make Bert Williams and George Walker, Bob Cole and Rosamond Johnson, Aida Overton Walker and Ernest Hogan stars in the African American community by covering their shows, commenting on their styles, offering affectionate portraits of their striving, and tracking their triumphs week in and week out. But they took center stage, giving artistic expression to ideas and experience. Similarly, in his work in public relations, Walton penned press releases for clients and campaign literature for the Democratic Party. He was the anonymous purveyor of information and “spin.” Walton composed music and wrote lyrics off and on from the early 1900s to the 1950s, but he rarely performed in public. He managed the Lafayette Theater in the late 1910s and traveled with Ethel Waters as her manager/producer in the early 1920s. When he worked on behalf of black performers through the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers, he made telephone calls, paid visits to the ofﬁces of corporate and broadcast executives, kept steady pressure on those who chose programming for television and radio, and when his work succeeded, others took the bow before the footlights. Walton’s ghostlike quality is a condition shared by thousands of men and women similarly employed in the culture industries of the twentieth century. As a class, these workers exerted tremendous inﬂuence on the public imagination and ways of knowing the world, but their own stories are largely unknown. Most of the time, we think of them in the aggregate if we think of them at all. And a scholar like Michael Denning, who turned his attention to this group for a deeper understanding of what he calls “the laboring of American culture,” understandably attended to workers who enjoyed at least some visibility, even if it was notoriety for their politics.43 Workers in the culture industries are not exactly the proletariat nor are they the owners of the means of production, to use Karl Marx’s terms for

43. Michael Denning, The Culture Front.

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the two great classes that have historically clashed. They gained attention in moments of crisis like the Red Scare of the 1950s or in the midst of the Culture Wars of the 1990s but not usually as individuals. They, like Walton, haunt the twentieth century as silent, nearly anonymous witnesses to and participants in the transformation of the public sphere by mass media. This relatively simple explanation goes a long way toward assisting our understanding Walton’s status as a missing person and also makes him all the more intriguing as a subject of study. He gives us a chance to see the political and social reach of one of the less-well-known culture workers. But the two moments mentioned above—the Red Scare and the Culture Wars—alert us to the dangers of looking into such a life. Political assessments usually accompany commentary on and analysis of culture workers suddenly brought to light. Depending on one’s political convictions, the Hollywood ﬁgures scrutinized by the House Un-American Activities Committee are either dangerous subversives or heroic defenders of the First Amendment—villains or victims. Likewise, the so-called liberal media in the 1990s either corroded the moral foundations of the nation and rammed “political correctness” down the throats of the citizenry or tried—modestly perhaps—to portray aspects of the reality of multicultural America. Ambiguity and complexity are not particularly welcome on these cultural battlefronts. Nevertheless, ambiguity and complexity are keys to unlocking the mystery of Walton’s disappearance from individual and collective memory and his virtual absence from the history of the United States in the twentieth century. This mystery, however, cannot be solved easily or quickly. It’s time-consuming to take the measure of this man, partly because he wrote so proliﬁcally and left behind him a mountain of original material in archives in New York, Washington, D. C., and Chicago, and on the pages of several important newspapers, and partly because of his determination to keep his conﬁdences, to avoid deeply personal revelations, and to construct and disseminate a personal narrative that softened—but never completely dissolved—a past and a heritage that haunted him. On the path along which I have pursued Lester Walton, I have felt, at times, pulled into a venture in which the tried-and-true practices of historical research are inadequate; indeed, the methods themselves become the objects of critical scrutiny and interrogation. The compulsion to pursue this elusive ﬁgure has become linked inextricably to fundamental, existential questions about what we in the present can know about the past, what we can’t know, and what value historical writing has, given its incommensurate relationship to the past. I agree with Carolyn Steedman’s point that historians obsessively write a story that has no end. For in writing about

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Walton, I’ve come to realize that his “life” both preceded his birth and continues on after his death—it can’t be bracketed by birth and death dates. Walton’s experience was conditioned by events and attitudes that took shape long before he drew his ﬁrst breath; his life was limited by what had been thought and done and what could yet be imagined and enacted. Insofar as he can speak to us today, Walton exerts an inﬂuence from beyond the grave. So, instead of writing a “story,” I want to explore how the research journey itself may contain the lessons we need from the past. Recognizing what we don’t and can’t know might be just as valuable as what we think we can say about the past.

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Chapter 2 Mysteries in the Archives

Rich archival collections in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D. C., that document much of Walton’s public and private experience from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s represent what historians often refer to as a “gold mine” or a “treasure trove” of original materials— letters, telegrams, speeches, typewritten and hand-corrected press releases, photographs, awards, scrapbooks, and programs. As the metaphorical language implies, the historian often enters the archives like a prospector, seeking valuable nuggets of information on and insight into the subject of his or her research, or like a pirate, pillaging the historical remains of a past life and carrying away the treasures for his or her own pleasure and enlightenment. Although no scholar expects to ﬁnd everything of importance needed to construct a biographical or historical narrative, most begin work in the archives assuming that the more material available, the thicker the description and analysis ultimately can be. I had a pretty clear image of Walton in mind based on what I had read by him in the Age and about him in the secondary literature. Here, I thought, was an untiring advocate for African American equality who focused his energy alternately on the stage, political party organization, U.S. foreign relations, and civil rights to combat Jim Crow and secondclass citizenship for the race. I hoped that in examining the treasures in the archives I could understand how these various activities were connected. How did Walton move from entertainment to politics to diplomacy to 33

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human rights? I thought about clever ways to unite these disparate commitments by grouping them under themes like “The Politics of Art” and “The Art of Politics.” So, armed with my metaphorical pick axe—or was it a parrot on my shoulder?—I entered the archives prepared to excavate and carry away what I needed to build a biographical narrative of a remarkable, forgotten man. But once I was in the main body of Walton papers, housed in New York, the image began shifting, vibrating with contradictions, and taking on much fuzzier outlines. Walton’s correspondents ranged from the “Who’s Who” of public life to the “Who’s That?” of obscurity. The sheer volume of material is overwhelming. Twenty-two boxes, many containing more than ten folders, hold dozens of letters received from his parents and sisters, hundreds more from professional contacts, and carbon copies of Walton’s own neatly typewritten letters and notes to friends, family, business associates, political allies, and colleagues. In addition to correspondence, one ﬁnds clipping ﬁles and press releases, numerous programs for formal luncheons and dinners he attended, ofﬁcial reports from a variety of government agencies, telegrams, warranties, receipts, ﬁnancial records, and two scrapbooks. A twenty-third box contains oversized items that testify to honors bestowed upon Walton toward the end of his life. His papers epitomize the links between the archives and print culture, a linkage strengthened in the twentieth century by technological advances that increase the speed and means of conveying ideas. Walton’s private voice could be prickly and defensive, uncertain and very unlike the public voice in which he critiqued others regularly and with abandon. Unexpected connections emerged as well, like his public relations contract with the Liberian government when he represented the United States as minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary in the 1930s and 1940s or his deep and abiding friendships with Herbert Bayard Swope and James A. Farley, who served as Franklin Roosevelt’s postmaster general.1 There was evidence of projects that never came to fruition—a layout for a proposed magazine on African American culture and entertainment dating from the early 1930s and a typewritten script for a television program called “Tenth 1. A letter from someone in President Tubman’s ofﬁce (name undecipherable) to Walton, February 27, 1946, LAWPA, box 11, ﬁle 2, offers a good example of the role Walton played as a public relations agent for the Liberian government. Correspondence between Walton and Swope is scattered throughout the collection, but for two excellent examples of the affectionate tone of many of their letters see Walton to Swope, January 29, 1955, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 18/14; and Swope to Walton, June 1, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle June 1938. A series of exchanges between Walton and Farley from late 1950 to mid-1955 can be found in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 9.

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Citizen, U.S.A.”2 More than enough material remains to document what Walton did in life, but something other than a pickax and a parrot is needed to make sense of what it all meant and why a list of achievements (and correspondents) that leaves one breathless has been almost completely forgotten. Entering Walton’s archives from the perspective of an archivist, instead of that of a historian, offers a different way of thinking about these materials and their meaning. Archivists pledge allegiance to the twin principles of provenance and original order, and they are bound by these dicta to do as little harm as possible to the artifacts. Archivists thoroughly document the donor and the creator of a collection in order to establish its origins and to aid in making those ever-crucial decisions about whether to accept a collection, how to describe it, and how to preserve it. Archivists impose order, when no apparent order exists, but their dedication to preserving fragile documents and the legacy of a collection’s creator deters them from interfering with the logic of organization whenever possible. These insights and the ﬁnding aid produced to guide a user through the Walton papers expose the contrived nature of my organizing themes. Assuming relatively minor interventions into the organizational scheme devised and employed by Walton—a fairly safe assumption given the number of “mis-ﬁled” letters—Walton’s papers are marked by overlapping interests and persistent commitments that were not, apparently, separated in his life. For example, although some folders are labeled as holding and actually do contain materials pertaining to Democratic Party politics, other such materials are scattered through the alphabetical and monthly/yearly correspondence ﬁles. The matters that historians may take up separately—and could, given the plethora of documents—were not separate for Walton, nor were they ever entirely ﬁnished. Walton’s papers, though no longer animated by his presence, his adding and perhaps removing of documents, and his energy, retain the aura of ongoing action, planning, and contingency. Walton’s past lived on in new ventures, for he did not know when interest in one endeavor would wane, when another might open up new opportunities, or still some other project might ﬁnally bear fruit. To tell his life story as if it were a continuous, linear narrative would run counter to the powerful evidence of the archives and would miss the hopefulness that emanates from his papers. 2. See ﬁlmscript of “Tenth Citizen, U.S.A.,” n.d., LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 12; and Lester A. Walton to Walter M. Furlow, Pepsi Cola Company, March 26, 1953, in LAWPA, box 17, ﬁle 17. The magazine was the result of a collaboration between Walton and Charlie Belle and would have been called Rhythm. The draft of the layout is dated June 1932 and can be found in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 2.

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One can see in Walton’s papers the mind of a journalist/publicist at work—carbon copies of letters and press releases he prepared—and his dependence on the typewriter. A letter here and a press release there, joined by shared content but ﬁled separately, testify to his nose for a news story and his talent for converting personal knowledge into public information. Walton’s “clipping ﬁle”—incomplete and now ochre-colored and crumbling with age—bears witness to his intermittent interest in archiving his own publications, or perhaps it speaks to his greater concern with meeting daily and weekly deadlines than with admiring and preserving his own prose. Penultimate drafts of press releases bear his signature editorial marks, a stet here, a caret there to add the telling adjective. Folders ﬁlled with reports from investigative commissions—notable among them the report from the League of Nations on the charge of slavery in Liberia in the late 1920s—represent sources, research to use in his work as a publicist and to prepare himself adequately when he became an aspirant to the position of U.S. minister to Liberia. Walton gathered facts from ofﬁcial proceedings and personal contacts to provide exact details, dollar amounts, and names that appeared in the articles he published. These details are hallmarks of his journalistic style and bear a striking resemblance to the pioneering sociological work published by his friend W. E. B. Du Bois that provided concrete data on the living conditions of African Americans in urban America.3 Copies of letters neither written by nor addressed to Walton also appear in various folders, raising questions about how they came to be in his possession—questions that ultimately cannot be answered.4 The overarching logic that drives Walton’s organizational scheme is radically egalitarian. That is, Walton made no distinctions between presidents and schoolteachers, statesmen and entertainers, businessmen and foreign exchange students from Africa, black friends and white. No color or gender lines deﬁne his ﬁling system. The simple alphabetical scheme, which he used to organize his papers for all but the years he spent in Liberia,

3. This resemblance was called to mind after hearing a presentation by Sandra Barnes, a coeditor of the centennial edition of Du Bois’s The Negro Church, and she emphasized Du Bois’s desire to collect and analyze social data related to African American churches. This essential discipline of the “Progressive Era” was justiﬁed as a quest for hard facts—truth—“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” 4. Most of the letters to which Walton was not a party were written on his behalf by inﬂuential friends and acquaintances. Some of them are about movements or institutions with which he had connections. There are also some allusions in correspondence between Walton and Barnett to letters making the rounds. It would appear, then, that the letters sent by or to others that ended up in Walton’s hands were not purloined.

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when distance from home and huge professional responsibilities increased the volume of correspondence enormously, made it relatively easy for Walton to locate letters from or to individuals based only on their names. The chief distinguishing categories were causes or realms of activity—for example, Democratic Party work, diplomacy in Liberia, the New York Commission on Intergroup Relations, and the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers—and there he kept track of ofﬁcial documents like bylaws, treaties, and transcripts of proceedings as well as pertinent correspondence. But on the whole, an outsider enters Walton’s world to ﬁnd celebrities and unknowns mingling freely. Reading Walton’s papers helps explain how people like him, everpresent in key events of the past, go unnoticed or unremarked by the scholar. The researcher, conscious of the clock ticking away during precious archives hours, may well skip over his name, instead zeroing in on the people already known to be movers and shakers. The logic of other organizing schemes may not be as egalitarian as Walton’s, making it even easier to focus on folders devoted to famous correspondents and to avoid “general correspondence,” where Walton’s missives may be found. This possibility came home when I asked a friend who planned to work in A. Philip Randolph’s papers to look for materials on Walton. Upon his return, he told me that Walton did not appear in the ﬁnding aid—nothing in the Randolph papers gave evidence of a relationship between the two men, professional or otherwise. Yet in Walton’s papers one ﬁnds invitations to dinner, letters debating the relative merits of George Meany’s labor agenda, and a program from a dinner held to honor Randolph in which the Waltons were seated with the Randolphs at the head table. An undated draft of a telegram from Walton to Randolph reads: “March on Washington for jobs and freedom highly signiﬁcant event in American History. A great day in struggle for equity and justice for all. Hats off to many thousands enthusiastic loyal Americans.”5 This telegram shows Walton’s awareness of his friend’s public activities and conveys a spirit of solidarity that belies his absence from Randolph’s papers and life. By contrast, letters from Du Bois in Walton’s papers are mostly hastily written notes inviting him to lunch and sharing family news. But letters to and from Walton published in The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois bespeak a much deeper exchange of ideas. Many focus on Walton’s appointment to represent the United States in Liberia—Walton reporting on conditions in the vulnerable republic, Du Bois offering insightful analysis of the forces 5. The telegram is in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 21; other correspondence can be found in box 18, ﬁle 15, and box 21, ﬁle 6.

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both inside and outside of Africa arrayed against the country.6 By themselves, the notes between Du Bois and Walton are opaque. They indicate that the two met with some regularity at the venerable Lüchow’s Restaurant when both of them were in New York, but it’s not clear what they might have discussed or what inﬂuence each might have had on the other. It would be easy and tempting to underestimate the impact of Du Bois’s pan-African commitments on Walton’s view of the relationship between his work in Africa and in the struggle for equality at home. Archives are sites of memory as well as haunted spaces, where secrets abide undetected in the absences and silences in the extant record. Many kinds of absences and silences are manifest in the Walton papers. Notes that document telephone conversations or face-to-face meetings rarely repeat the subject under discussion. Short notes between Walton and executives at radio and television stations—one thanking the other for a particular meeting or arranging time to discuss matters of mutual interest—testify only to Walton’s lobbying on behalf of African Americans in the entertainment business, but remain mute on the nature or efﬁcacy of his efforts. Typical of such exchanges are letters between Walton and Lawrence W. Lowman, an executive at CBS. In early August 1951, Lowman wrote: “It was a great pleasure meeting you and your associates the other day and I do appreciate your coming here to discuss our mutual problems.” What were their “mutual problems,” or better still, how did they deﬁne them? Who accompanied Walton to CBS headquarters? Walton’s reply about a week later thanks Lowman for meeting with him and ends with “the Council looks forward to strengthening the cooperative relationship which it has established with CBS.”7 Other letters written by Walton are more substantive, ﬁlled with suggestions for new programming, praising executives when they have hired good African American actors or employees, criticizing them for lapses in their attention to race issues, and linking the exclusion of minority performers from the media to the challenges faced by the nation in its war against communism abroad.8

6. Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, 103–6, 133–34, 144– 45, 182–83, 287–90. 7. Lowman to Walton, August 2, 1951, and Walton to Lowman, August 8, 1951, both in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 10. 8. Letters between Walton and Robert E. Kalaidjian, director of personnel relations at CBS, can be found in LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 3 and box 6, ﬁle 9; most of the letters between Walton and Lawrence Lowman at CBS are in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 10; a prospectus for the “One America” program is in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 18; and for examples of correspondence between Walton and David Sarnoff and Edward Stanley, executives at NBC, see box 18, ﬁles 14 and 20.

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A glaring hole in the Walton papers in New York is the lack of evidence of his work as a publicist for Harvey S. Firestone in the 1920s. Letters to and from the Firestones can be found in the collection, but the detailed letters exchanged by Claude A. Barnett, founder and director of the Associated Negro Press in Chicago, are housed in Barnett’s papers at the Chicago Historical Society. The two journalists, hoping to arrange a lucrative deal with Firestone that would help the industrialist through a public relations nightmare in Liberia in the 1920s, referred to Firestone and his oldest son as “No. 1” and “No. 2” as they discussed details of meetings in Akron and New York. This coded language stands out starkly from the language used in other Walton writings, which is generally straightforward, though at times necessarily circumspect. Was this an afﬁliation of which Walton was ashamed or about which he had misgivings? When did he purge the correspondence tying him to this venture? As soon as Barnett’s letters arrived or after some time had passed? Was he responsible for their absence at all, or did the donors remove what they perceived to be materials that cast shadows on the patriarch? There are undoubtedly other gaps, silences, and purges in this archival collection. But this handful illustrates the challenges posed by archives as well as the promise they hold when taken on their own terms as evidence. The Walton papers came into being, quite likely, without any sense of destiny, posterity, or history. They contain the reminders of beloved friends and family, of actions taken, purchases made, articles published, contacts established as well as the detritus of modern civilization that many of us ﬁle simply as an alternative to tossing items that might come in handy at some unspeciﬁed future date. They take on a kind of purposefulness toward the end of Walton’s tenure as the editor of the Age’s drama page. Before his letter to the Associated Press, urging afﬁliated editors to capitalize the word Negro, the collection is haphazard. This act—of stepping outside his position to take a public stance—might be seen as signifying the moment of political consciousness, a decision to intrude more directly into the nationwide political struggle. It marks a point where Walton sensed that writing articles in an African American newspaper for a predominantly African American readership was no longer sufﬁcient for writing the race into existence.

“A Phantom Speaks” One of the most mysterious and rewarding effects of entering the archives was to develop a relationship with a person no longer living. The eager anticipation I felt upon opening a box and selecting a ﬁle to read suggests

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more than doing a job. It was like sitting down with a person I had gotten to know through increasingly frequent encounters and with whom I shared uninterrupted hours of conversation. Walton’s words reminded me of past such “conversations,” and each time I wondered if he’d tell me more. Even when his own words were not the source of enlightenment, it was as if he were handing me the letters, memoranda, or press clippings that would clarify some point I had not earlier understood. This intimacy, which some historians deplore as a lack of objectivity, extended beyond the walls of the archival reading room as I lugged notes and photocopies, giving them a privileged spot in hand luggage, and handling, sorting, rereading, and resorting them more conscientiously than the objects I save from people in my own family and circle of friends. Research always involves remembering—where did I read that before? Where did I ﬁle that letter? Is that how he described the same event at another point in his life? Remembering Walton through the years and witnessing his own remembering led to an unexpected auditory experience. I began to “hear” his voice. Lest you think this project has sent me around the proverbial bend, let me clarify that the voice did not whisper of its own volition, directing me here or there or to perform unseemly acts. Rather, it was the comforting recognition of his cadences, his favorite phrases, his signature syntax that I felt. Walton, a phantom, speaks, not by responding to queries or exclamations of surprise or frustration. (In that sense, ours was not a typical conversation.) But hearing Walton’s voice while reading his private and public writings and distinguishing his various registers was every bit as crucial as a historical practice as making accurate citations or applying tried-and-true analytical categories to the materials in his archives. That this admission further implicates me in this story is beyond doubt, but it would also have been the case had I not heard his voice and had I not tried to write about its sound. For pursuing objectivity, while considered a “noble dream,” does not relieve historians of the responsibility of having chosen a subject and having crafted a narrative that they devised from archival remains.9 I have already acknowledged the extent to which I am implicated in this project, but my interest here is in the ways Walton, long since dead, con9. Jacques Derrida, in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, has offered a different way to think about how a “phantom speaks,” and indeed, I borrowed the phrase from him. If you would like to explore the possibility of a phantom speaking from another angle, see this work. For an excellent discussion of “objectivity” see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. See also Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reﬂections on Microhistory and Biography,” 129–44.

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tinues to speak and to shape the way his life’s story is to be told. There are at least three registers to Walton’s spectral voice, each of which contributes something to a deeper apprehension of Walton’s work and his absence from the popular imagination. The ﬁrst is a deceptively meandering style of communication, neither singsongy nor aimless, that attempts to monopolize the conversation. The second is a persistent contradiction in selfunderstanding—a double tonal pomp and unfortunate circumstance—that may well have contributed to his contemporaries’ uneasiness about his objectives and accomplishments. The third can perhaps best be described as a howling echo, arising from a need to repeat a cluster of themes that reverberated across time and space in Walton’s own life. This echo testiﬁes to an unresolved original event that Walton could never fully own or disavow and the effects of which in Walton’s persona and writing others found disturbing. I became aware of the ﬁrst register almost from the beginning, reading his columns in the Age, which here I am considering part of Walton’s “archive.” Walton’s prose draws one into long and involved sentences and stories of great interest and leaves readers with some kind of effect. But neither his published columns nor his correspondence lend themselves readily to quotation—at least, not punchy, economical quotation. Walton typically circles an idea or a position, each phrase and clause that extends a sentence adding a nuance of importance. But the full effect of a Walton editorial or letter comes from the whole, not from a signature phrase or sentence. The notes I took during my ﬁrst visit to his collected papers in New York and from reading his Age pieces contain long passages of quoted material followed by brief summaries of the larger point. In the intervening years, I have often returned to material I had read earlier to see what he actually had said in the passages I tried to summarize, so notes on the same essays or letters, written in different colored ink at different times, appear in my now-bulging ﬁles. I often caution students to avoid excessive photocopying or taking down every word of every document, because if one waits to read and to process archival materials until after the research trip, the chance to follow unexpected leads may be lost. But I ignored my own advice, because the meaning was lost without all of the parts of a paragraph or a column. “The Recent Drama,” an article that appeared in the Age on February 18, 1909, is exemplary. Walton’s editorial focused on the Republican Club meeting held at the Waldorf-Astoria on the one hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Booker T. Washington, one of the featured guests and the focus of Walton’s column, met the grandson of his former owner then delivered a speech that was received, according to Walton,

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“tumultuously, clamorously, riotously.” While these three adverbs are easily assimilated, the remainder of the article resists such easy cribbing. Listen to Walton’s voice: How much would Klaw and Erlanger, and the Schuberts, give to be able to present a drama that would cause these men who attend shows evening after evening, to make known their approval by other than the customary nod of approval, smile and hand clap? Were they so vitally affected as to cause them to lose their reserve surely the occasion must have been one of unusual interest and signiﬁcance! Klein, Bernstein, Thomas, Walter, and Fitch, our most successful dramatists of to-day, could not have conceived a more dramatic situation; Belasco and Marion could not have conceived a more pretentious stage setting; nor could have Frohman furnished a more suitable place for the presentation of the drama than the Waldorf-Astoria, the leading hotel of America. And, again, so far as we Americans are concerned, such a dramatic scene could not have been enacted on a more historic occasion—the onehundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.

All of this rich prose is mere setup and, one might argue, could be cut to get to the point of the drama. But such amputation would do great violence to Walton’s writing, for it mattered to him that a white audience shed its reserve in showing approval of Washington’s speech; that the leading (white) dramatists, producers, and impresarios could not imagine anything more signiﬁcant; and that it had taken place in “the leading hotel of America.” This one paragraph, replete with Walton’s knowledge of the legitimate theater and utterly devoid of the content of the speech that had generated the uncharacteristic response, builds toward a climax that never comes except cumulatively and after thoughtful reﬂection. Walton goes on to editorialize on the power of drama to shape “sentiment,” noting, “We all know what ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did for the Negro and neither are we ignorant of the result that writers of such plays as the ‘Clansman’ seek to bring about.” Walton’s view of the sentiment generated by Washington’s appearance at the Republican Club’s reception is not clear until the end of this long paragraph: Some of us pay too little attention to incidents that may appear trivial in their nature, but which are likely to mean much in the future. To some the reception accorded Booker T. Washington after his speech at the Waldorf-Astoria may appear insigniﬁcant, but to others it means much—not so much to the well-known educator as to members of the Negro race. We feel sure that the judges, senators, bankers and commercial men present have for some time had a high regard for Booker T.

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Washington but we doubt if their opinion of the race in general was as high before the speech was delivered as afterwards.

Whatever else Washington may have said, Walton asserts here that the reminder from the Wizard of Tuskegee that those “‘who speak your tongue, profess your religion—who have never lifted their voices or hands except in defense of their country’s honor and their country’s ﬂag, and swear eternal fealty to the memory and traditions of the sainted Lincoln’” would transform white attitudes toward Negroes. He punctuates the argument at the very end of his comment by comparing Washington to an actor who will not know until the end of his career what he has accomplished: “But the actor, speaking in the broadest sense, as Booker T. Washington, plays a part in this era that will, when the ﬁnal curtain is rung down on his dramatic career, not only leave tender memories, but evidences of the many dramas in which he appeared as a star performer, which will be apparent by the progress and advancement of the Negro race.”10 Ultimately, “the recent drama” consists of several dramas— a former slave reuniting with his owner’s heir on equal footing; a crowd of successful and powerful white men hailing an African American educator; the presence of a black speaker at a reception to honor the Great Emancipator held in a commercial preserve of white privilege; and the prospect that this event will transform white attitudes toward African Americans. Walton’s style, which is not readily quotable, may seem out of keeping with the work of a journalist, work for which he was greatly admired. But his uneconomical tendencies as a writer served a purpose and may well have reﬂected a contemporaneous improvisational impulse. The purposes served by Walton’s long sentences, frequently broken by asides and dependent clauses, included establishing his authority as a critic and showcasing his extensive knowledge of a subject, both of which are key elements of effective argumentation. Walton’s prose style also made serious points indirectly, empowering black readers as they drew their own conclusions from his essays and shielding Walton from accusations of rabble-rousing by white readers. Walton’s writing is reminiscent in some ways of what David Krasner has written of Jack Johnson’s performance as 10. Lester A. Walton, “The Recent Drama,” New York Age, February 18, 1909, 6, col. 1–2. The reference to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” of course, is to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, which has been credited with drawing more supporters to the abolitionist cause, and “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, was eventually adapted as the ﬁlm Birth of a Nation, known for its vicious portrayal of African Americans as predatory beasts.

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a boxer: “Johnson’s performative style contained a contradiction compelled by life; he appeared one way, when in fact he was another. His laxity in fact concealed seriousness; it masked the ferocity of his purpose. The ability to appear one way and be another was a realization of the improvisational style and the paradoxes inherent in it.”11 Cognizance of this register in Walton’s voice forces readers today to confront the seriousness of purpose that lay beneath the surface of his amiable, long-winded essays. The essay Walton published on the occasion of the death of George Walker suggests how his indirect style often contained prescriptions for his readers that reﬂected his political stance. After reporting on the funeral and summarizing the highlights of Walker’s rise to stardom, Walton offered his view of what Walker meant to African American performers and audiences—Walker’s perseverance against racist opposition had resulted in success, and his success paved the way for steady, well-paid employment for others typically denied such opportunities in a ﬁeld dominated by whites. He concludes the essay: Of all the institutions and inﬂuences, the stage is one of the greatest civilizers of to-day; and George Walker has played an important part in the process of civilizing the white public with regard to what the American Negro of modern times really is. In years to come, when some of us today and those of to-morrow look backward on his life and work; when we as a race become imbued with a higher regard for our own history and of the doings of those who have gone before; when the Negro will have learned that it is not for the white man to ﬁrst manifest a high appreciation of the history of his race, then the loss of George W. Walker will be more fully realized, and he will be revered and held as one of the great men of his time and of his people.12

In this passage (which consists of only two sentences), Walton indirectly plants the idea that African Americans must come to appreciate their own history and quit taking their cues from white arbiters of culture and politics. He adroitly reverses the racial identiﬁcation of “civilizer” from white

11. Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 48. For a longer discussion of this improvisational style and its links to social conditions of the era (which, of course, Walton shared with Johnson), see 40–52. I would also draw your attention to Krasner’s difﬁculty in quoting Walton in full—ellipses replace prose that undoubtedly seemed extraneous to the point the author wanted to make about the effect of Johnson’s victory on African Americans, see 41. 12. Lester A. Walton, “Death of George W. Walker,” New York Age, January 12, 1911, 6, col. 4. The entire obituary, including a smiling portrait of Walker, covers the ﬁrst four columns of the page.

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to Negro without calling attention to the point. In short, here, as elsewhere, Walton’s rhetorical strategy allowed him to make pointed political comments without appearing shrill. Many of the same elements of this register can be heard in Walton’s private professional writing, but if anything, his tone is even more guarded. His own practice of keeping carbon copies of letters he sent to professional contacts as well as the numerous carbon copies sent to him by others indicate a private world of communication that was never fully private and could not be counted upon to remain conﬁdential. Thus, along with chatty conversational items about family activities and fond regards to his correspondent and his or her family (when applicable, of course), Walton maintained his roundabout locution when he touched on matters of signiﬁcance. In a letter to Washington, D. C., journalist Drew Pearson in early 1945, for example, he congratulates Pearson for a radio broadcast that paid tribute to the Ninety-second Division—an historically black army division—ﬁghting in Italy. Then he observes: “Now and then one wonders if many Americans really know what our boys are ﬁghting for and why our civilian population is compelled to make sacriﬁces on the home front. I do hope the real meaning of democracy will be more thoroughly understood after this war than was the case after the last war.” In these sentences, Walton appears to be articulating the substance of what was known at the time as the “Double-V Campaign”—victory for democracy abroad and at home. But he hedges somewhat in the next paragraph: I have often heard colored Americans in uniform vehemently exclaim that if they have to ﬁght overseas to make the world safe for democracy they intend to risk their lives to make democracy safe at home. With the return of the Negro soldier after the war I greatly fear that unless the leaders of both races display more light than heat and a determined effort is made to give the colored American a squarer deal, we are going to be confronted in this country with a very serious interracial situation.

As his postwar efforts show, Walton took part in numerous activities to “make democracy safe at home,” but he is careful here not to link himself to any kind of radical group or action, and he resorts to the passive voice (“is given” and “are going to be confronted”) that refuses to assign responsibility for a situation that he fears. As in his published pieces, Walton devotes several passages to establishing his authority as a commentator; in this case, he identiﬁes himself “[a]s a student of the history of the Negro soldier in all wars in which Americans have been engaged since the heroism of Crispus Attucks.” But he doesn’t stop with that assertion. Walton recalls his time in France after

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the First World War, when he paid tribute to the fallen soldiers of the Ninety-second Division “most of whom had been killed only a few hours before the Armistice.” He remembered that very little about these African American soldiers had appeared in the American press—except for what Walton himself had penned for the Age. As one who had remembered their valor, Walton claimed the authority to praise a fellow journalist who did likewise in the Second World War.13 As a phantom, Walton speaks as he spoke in these public and semiprivate documents in a voice that is unmistakable. Establishing his authority, showcasing his knowledge, writing circuitous sentences and paragraphs that compel attention even while they mask the main thrust of his politics—Walton developed a manner of communicating that refused to be easily absorbed into others’ prose, and because of that resistance, Walton still controls important aspects of his story. The sheer volume of words and this intriguing register make Walton at once hypervisible and elusive. There’s both more and less in his writing than meets the eye of the hasty or impatient reader. But immersing myself in Walton’s archives, listening to his voice and cadences, brought me in closer contact with him, because I came to recognize his signature phrasing even when his actual signature (or byline) was missing. It also intensiﬁes one of the mysteries revealed in the archives. Walton published weekly columns over a byline for more than twenty years. He corresponded with hundreds of men and women, many of whom enjoyed immense power and prestige, and yet few remember him. At one point my inclination was to suppose that this evasive style of writing left his professional contacts and personal friends with the mistaken impression that he really stood for nothing—or, perhaps more accurately, that he refused to take a stand on matters of importance. But the other aspects of Walton’s voice and the continuing support for and promotion of Walton’s career suggest otherwise. The second register, which I have dubbed “pomp and unfortunate circumstance” appears only in private or semiprivate writings—letters to friends and associates. What I mean by this phrase is that Walton craved honor and recognition at the same time that he believed that his commit13. Walton to Drew Pearson, January 1, 1945, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 20. Although Walton was still the U.S. minister to Liberia, he wrote this letter from his home in New York City. During election years, which I will discuss at some length below, it was Walton’s wont to return to the United States for at least part of the campaign season, and he sometimes extended his stays well past the election. For several years, Walton had been complaining of numerous medical problems derived from the climate and conditions in Monrovia, from which he sought relief with longer stays in New York. See, for example, Walton to Dr. Savory, August 9, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle August 1938.

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ment to behind-the-scenes work made others underestimate him. This contrapuntal motif in Walton’s correspondence sets in opposition his status as a worker in the culture industries of burgeoning mass culture and his desire to lead. Not surprisingly, most of the evidence of this element of Walton’s voice appears in letters from the last thirty years of his life, when the tension between his expertise in public relations and his longing to take a leading part in public affairs was most pronounced. Many of the letters also reﬂect rivalries between Walton and men like him who were competing for relatively scarce positions of power in a system dominated by whites. In the 1920s and 1930s, the years that mark Walton’s most active involvement in Democratic Party politics, tension between Walton and Robert Vann, a lawyer and journalist afﬁliated with the inﬂuential Pittsburgh Courier, surfaced repeatedly in letters Walton sent to his friend Claude A. Barnett. In 1933, Walton complained to Barnett that “Most of our leaders assume a false leadership and display an ignorance of what’s going on that [is] lamentable.” Walton himself had played an important role in the publicity division of the party and had yet to be rewarded by the new Roosevelt administration. “I wrote Vann congratulating him on his appointment in U.S. Attorney General’s ofﬁce, but no letter of thanks has been forthcoming to date,” he wrote.14 A few years later, writing from his post in Monrovia and still fuming about Vann, he vented his anger at the Pittsburgh Courier’s publishing a slanderous story about Walton’s younger daughter as well as an inaccurate report on conditions in Liberia. “So it appears to me Vann is trying to do some underhanded, undercover dirt. But he cannot really hurt me.” Yet obviously, Vann had hurt him—only his wife’s unbending opposition prevented Walton from suing the Courier for libel. Moreover, on this occasion, Walton countered Vann’s dismissiveness with an assertion of his status. He wrote: “You well know how I came to be Minister. The position sought me.” And for good measure, he appended a handwritten note—“Despite ballyhoo, I am receiving more material consideration than any Negro holding a political job; and that goes for Federal, State, & Municipal jobs.”15 Walton maintained repeatedly that he had never sought political reward, resented others who were rewarded for, in his view, lesser service, and vowed to keep working quietly for the betterment of international and interracial relations. Walton craved recognition for his work. In 1934, he scolded Barnett for excluding his “memorable trip to Liberia and Geneva” from his “chronological dissertation on outstanding events for 1933.” “Nobody knows better 14. Walton to Barnett, July 1, 1933, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927–1934. 15. Walton to Barnett, July 13, 1937, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938.

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than you that I don’t court publicity; in fact, that I dodge it,” he wrote Barnett. “But when I observe omission of any reference to my going to Liberia and Geneva, I am prompted to wonder whether such an act was an oversight or mute evidence that the brother just does not ﬁgure me. Of course, I know full well where and how I stand in the ranks of daily journalism, which was reﬂected in the big spread the New York Herald Tribune recently gave me in my article on the Liberian situation.”16 Yet not too many years later, he felt the need to remind Barnett of his accomplishments in the ﬁeld of journalism. He recalled his stint with the New York World as a feature writer, his standing as the “outstanding golf writer in the whole city” of St. Louis at the turn of the century, and “the attention paid my theatrical criticisms by white daily and weekly publications.” He concluded with a remark that captured his angst: “I am beginning to wonder if I didn’t pay too much attention to boosting everybody but myself.”17 Indeed, when in 1951, Walton was admitted to the Society of Silurians, an exclusive New York association of newspapermen, he sent a letter to Ed Sullivan, a former associate at the New York World: “You may be interested to know that ‘Lester A. Walton, veteran newspaperman and former U.S. Minister to Liberia, has been elected a member of the Society of Silurians.’ I think this information should be imparted to Mr. Joseph Stalin et al., and any reference to my election in your column will be appreciated.” He also sent a note to Raymond L. Crowley, managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “I am the ﬁrst of my race to be admitted to membership in the Society of Silurians, and my application was favorably acted upon by a unanimous vote of the Membership Committee.”18 Walton’s work on behalf of the Democratic Party brought the tension between his public relations experience and his desire for recognition into high relief. In 1936, he encouraged Barnett to organize a letter-writing campaign to the State Department requesting the minister’s return to take part in the election process. His own part in the effort contained both modesty and bravado. He wrote Harry A. McBride I have taken the liberty of advising Mr. Charles Michelson to get in touch with you personally if there is a desire that I return to the United States to participate (not too conspicuously) in the Presidential campaign. As you doubtless know, in 1924–28-32, I served as director of publicity of the 16. Walton to Barnett, January 8, 1934, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927– 1934. 17. Walton to Barnett, April 14, 1941, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1939–1964. 18. Walton to Ed Sullivan, November 16, 1951, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 17; and Walton to Raymond L. Crowley, November 15, 1951, LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 7.

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Colored Division of the Democratic National Committee. Recently I have received communications from colored leaders expressing the hope that I play some part during the last two months of the campaign— September and October. They seem to think I am “Exhibit A” of the Administration from their standpoint.19

The State Department approved Walton’s request, and he worked feverishly that fall to organize the Speakers’ Bureau, to stump for Roosevelt, and to offer ideas for campaign literature. In 1939, Walton sent Farley a long missive from Monrovia offering advice on how best to keep African Americans—especially those residing in Harlem—from returning to the Republican Party ranks. Walton was recalled again in 1940 and although he did not hold an ofﬁcial position in the party, matters related to black voters were directed to his attention. Although Walton wrote his friend the Reverend Reverdy Ransom, “I do not propose to take a conspicuous part” in the campaign, many letters in his archives show him taking a leading role in organizing the party’s appeal to African Americans.20 Perhaps it was Walton’s desire to remain “inconspicuous” that has resulted in his virtual erasure from the histories of this important political realignment. Or was it the incongruity between his stated determination to remain in the shadows and his insinuation of himself into the limelight that put off associates in the Democratic Party? The ﬁrst two registers of Walton’s voice from beyond the grave were immediately apparent and became sources of both exasperation and endearment. I wanted from him quotable quotes almost as badly as I wanted him to agree with my appraisal of Scott Joplin’s signiﬁcance as a composer. But his prose always slowed me down, held me back from making quick judgments, and forced me to take the time to do him justice—it 19. Walton to Harry A. McBride, May 11, 1936, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. Barnett sent identical letters to Bishop R. C. Ransom, Judge Ormond B. Scott, Sen. James Hamilton Lewis, and attorney Earl B. Dickerson on June 1, 1936, asking them to write James A. Farley to put pressure on the State Department to order Walton’s return. See CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton 1935–1938. A copy of Judge Scott’s letter to the postmaster general, dated June 6, 1936, can be found in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. 20. Evidence of Walton’s activity in 1936 can be found in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938, and box 341, ﬁle 1; and press clippings in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 24, and box 15, green scrapbook, 4. On his activities during the 1940 election season, see Walton to James A. Farley, March 4, 1939, and correspondence between Walton and Charles Michelson, E. L. Roddam, McKee, and Paul C. Aiken, all in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. A follow-up letter from Walton to Farley, May 24, 1939, is in LAWPA, box 10, ﬁle 7; a request for information from Walton to Charles E. Hall, November 4, 1939, is in box 10, ﬁle 10; and Walton to Ralph E. Mizelle, June 5, 1939, is located in box 9, ﬁle Corr. 3/1939, which is just one example of a “misﬁled” letter in his collection.

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interfered palpably with my job of imposing historical meaning on his work. At the same time, his locutions and his seeking and avoiding center stage struck me as responses to the condition of work many professionals in bureaucratic organizations routinely face. Jackson Lears reminded us decades ago that advertising men were experiencing the social changes that accompanied consumerism as intensely as the readers of their ad copy—that insofar as the products of those particular culture workers spoke to anxieties felt by men and women living in a more bureaucratic and therapeutic age, worrying about how others saw and judged them, they were speaking as directly to their own fears.21 Walton, as another kind of culture worker, may have shared the uneasiness of advertising men, but his race undoubtedly added a special twist, for at one level he knew that others were judging him based on preconceived notions about African American inferiority. But his voice lets us in on another aspect of both his work and his race. Even as he reassured white readers of his amiability, he spoke a message that called for social change. Moreover, his love-hate relationship with the limelight points to an unresolved tension in the culture industries between self-promotion and the advancement of an ethos. Like the advertising men, whom Lears describes as “anxious and confused,” Walton helped give shape to mass media in the hope of bettering his condition, providing information that would lead to greater understanding between the races, and spurring democratic reform that would transform the nature of social relations that propped up mass communication in the ﬁrst place. Walton spent much of his active career torn between the individual advancement he knew modern communication could promote and the collective goals of social equality and social justice that he believed could be most effectively reached by working unnoticed in the production of alternative ways of thinking. Reading through his papers in the archives, one can hear the tension in Walton’s voice. There was one ﬁnal register, and it took me a while to separate it from the other two. Unlike the other two, which were identiﬁable as a style and a tone, the third had more to do with a subject: Walton’s identity. He insisted adamantly—and, one might argue, obsessively—that he was an American. Of course, he was an American, but when the question of national identiﬁcation came up in Walton’s life, it was almost always

21. T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, 1–38.

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linked to race. In private letters, like one he wrote to his friend Bill Foster in 1937, and in professional correspondence, like a letter he sent the editor of Life in 1946, he ﬁercely claimed his status as an American. To Foster he wrote, “I am not the Negro Minister to the Republic of Liberia, but the American Minister;” nearly a decade later, in his letter to Brown, he echoed that assertion: “I am not the Negro Minister to Liberia as some publications have persisted in tagging me, but the American Minister.”22 At ﬁrst, I satisﬁed myself that statements like these represented a political position—a reference to the gap between the ideal and the lived reality of citizenship for African Americans in the United States. Walton similarly objected to comments about Jackie Robinson as “one of the best Negro athletes in the United States” and Marian Anderson as a “credit to her race.”23 In time, however, this explanation seemed ﬂimsy. Something more than semantics was in play. Although Walton forged ahead as a journalist, political activist, diplomat, and civil rights worker as if he enjoyed all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of citizenship, his constant assertion of his nationality points toward an uneasy feeling of not belonging to the “imagined community” of the United States. Moreover, the repeated “I am not the Negro Minister” always sounded initially like a denial of his race. In most of his public writing and speaking, Walton reserved angry prose for outrage at the mistreatment of the group; he rarely shared personal incidents of racial discrimination. In all of his extant writings, I found only two references to an “unpleasant incident,” and each involved a conﬂict over his race. Only one was a public declaration, and it contained very few details about what had happened. Like victims of trauma, Walton seemed unable to articulate the circumstances surrounding this crucial lifeshaping event but returned to it again and again in indirect ways. What lay beneath the “unpleasantness” emerged as one of the most important mysteries in Walton’s archives, and trying to ﬁgure it out became the most challenging aspect of knowing Walton. At this point, I will observe simply that we in the twenty-ﬁrst century need to know Walton if for no other reason than because he grudgingly gives us access to one of the tragedies of American life—the routine traumatizing of people of color. I should add here that this tension between race and nationality made biography—traditional, cultural, or microhistorical—deeply problematic.

22. Walton to Bill Foster, November 21, 1937, in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 10; and Walton to Earl Brown, January 19, 1946, in LAWPA, box 13, ﬁle 2. 23. Walton to Earl Brown, January 19, 1946, in LAWPA, box 13, ﬁle 2; and a clipping of Walton to the editor of the New York Times, which is undated but can be found in LAWPA, box 19, ﬁle 7.

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If his fellow (white) citizens denied his inclusion into the body politic, how is his an “American life”? Likewise, what could Walton reveal about a culture when he was marginalized from it? I do believe that Walton has a great deal to tell us about American society and culture, a great deal that is bound to make Americans—both black and white—uncomfortable. But biographical narratives depend upon the telling of a life story that demonstrates movement toward an end, progress, if you will, and Walton’s life, as this register made clear, formed an eddy around the tendentious meaning of identity in America. It doesn’t ﬂow either forward or backward but doubles back on itself, reliving but never quite recounting the injustice and indignity that arise from being forced to choose only one marker of self. Not all Americans faced this choice. Many who did chose differently than Walton. Walton’s privileging of nationality over race did not prevent him from working throughout his adult life in the struggle for racial equality in the United States, but it no doubt made others chafe. In 1922, for example, A. Philip Randolph’s partner at The Messenger, Owen Chandler, lambasted the New York Age and Fred R. Moore, its editor and Walton’s father-in-law, for deferring so obsequiously to white people and their opinions. Chandler argued that the Age was regarded as one of the “ ‘better behaved’ of the Negro publications” and that it stood for “racial harmony.” But these characteristics, he believed, subordinated the best interests of Negroes to those of whites. Although Walton was not speciﬁcally mentioned in this harsh critique, one can ﬁnd evidence in Walton’s Age columns of the mindset Chandler denounced. As I noted above, Walton took pleasure in the fact that his theater criticism was read and discussed by writers on white weeklies and dailies. Indeed, Walton spent a good deal of time during landmark African American performances gauging the responses of white audience members to blacks in the theater both on and off the stage. He even commented at some length in his coverage of Ridgely Torrence’s plays in 1917 on how white people must have felt seeing themselves portrayed in unﬂattering ways. Those sympathetic with Chandler’s position may well have been frustrated by Walton’s concern with white responses to African Americans and their arts. Moreover, the kind of “colorblindness” implicit in Walton’s embrace of his status as an American plays right into the hands of racists, who see African American subordination as evidence of their inherent inequality.24 24. Owen Chandler, “A Voice from the Dead!” in Sondra Kathryn Wilson, ed., The Messenger Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the Messenger Magazine, 322–28. The essay originally appeared in the April 1922 issue of the Messenger. For Walton’s concern about white reactions to African Americans see Sotiropoulos, Staging Race. For his

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And so the phantom speaks today in varying registers that remind us of his humanity and complexity. Although Walton’s voice reveals layers of experience, the process of discerning the various notes and shadings in it makes it one of the mysteries in the archives. But other phantoms lurk in Walton’s archives, and they represent mysteries as we understand that term—things unknown, unexplained, or kept secret. I doubt that Walton’s archives is exceptional in this regard—some aspects of a past life simply can’t be explained. But instead of deciding on a plausible explanation for Walton’s origins and family, I’ve decided to dwell for a time on what can be learned from acknowledging the incommensurability of the past. Thus, a tidy narrative gives way to one frayed and ﬁlled with holes. Perhaps the act of remembering, called forth by the gaps, can help us discover what we need to know.

Family Plots When The Waltons ﬁrst aired on national television in 1972, viewers met an extended family living on a mountaintop in Virginia, struggling to survive the hard times of the Great Depression. Each episode, narrated by the son who had become a successful writer, tapped into important myths about and values associated with family life at a time when social conditions and mass culture worked vigorously against them. The program evoked nostalgia for a simpler time among many viewers and represented the fantasy fulﬁllment of the “American Dream.” The Waltons were poor but honest, hard-working, and loving members of a family and a rural community, and when viewers last saw them, those virtues had paid off handsomely. Each of the Walton children had found his or her destiny and enjoyed the upward social mobility that is, in the popular imagination, the birthright of (white) Americans. At the end of each episode, the long series of “Good nights” hollered from room to room as lights went out until the Walton home was but a silhouette against the forest and the mountain, testiﬁed to family ties that joined destiny to childhood in fairly unproblematic ways. The Waltons’ story, based on the experiences of its creator, Earl Hamner Jr., embodied an aspect of biographical and autobiographical writing that assumes a direct,

review of the Torrence plays see Walton, “Negro Actors Make Debut in Drama at Garden Theatre,” New York Age, April 12, 1917, 1, col. 1–2; 6, col. 1–2; and for a longer discussion see Curtis, First Black Actors on the Great White Way, chapter 5. In The Color Line, John Hope Franklin shows how “color-blind” policymakers have dismantled Afﬁrmative Action and restored the obstacles to racial equality.

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teleological link between the circumstances of and inﬂuences on youth and the adult who has become worthy of study.25 The Walton family of St. Louis can be viewed as the photographic negative of the television family’s image. Black, urban, and wage workers, the St. Louis Waltons were likewise bound by ties of affection and were eager to achieve success during a time of trials—the immediate postReconstruction period. Benjamin A. Walton and his wife, Olive May Camper Walton, had ﬁve children, Lester (“Les”), Nancy (“Nan”), Benjamin (“Benny”), Julia (“Jul”), and Lucille (“Babens”), all of whom enjoyed success in their chosen ﬁelds. At different times, Benjamin and Olive Walton opened their home to other relatives, including grandchildren availing themselves of educational opportunities in St. Louis. The St. Louis Waltons, unlike the television Waltons, did not live in the home of their immediate ancestors—in fact, they shared their ﬁrst home in St. Louis with another, unrelated, African American family, the Frank McKennas.26 And the relationship between the family and the destiny of each child is not easy to explain. Their story also does not inspire misty-eyed nostalgia— rather, it forces a painful confrontation with the corrosive social effects of slavery and racism on American lives. I did not anticipate another mystery that surrounds Walton and his family when I entered the archives. I saved research on Walton’s childhood until the very end, partly because it promised to be so straightforward and partly because the bulk of his personal and professional papers focused on his adulthood. Irving Dilliard, an acquaintance of Walton’s in St. Louis with whom he corresponded off and on for several years, wrote Lester Walton’s entry for the Dictionary of American Biography. The ﬁrst two sentences read: “WALTON, LESTER AGLAR (Apr. 20, 1882–Oct. 16, 1965), diplomat and journalist, was born in St. Louis, Mo., the son of Benjamin A. Walton, a public school janitor and custodian, and of Ollie May Camphor [sic]. After he graduated from the segregated Sumner High School, his father engaged a white tutor to help him pass an examination for a certiﬁcate of graduation from a business school.”27 It seemed a bit odd that the certiﬁcate was not ﬁled among Walton’s papers and that the business school was not identiﬁed by name, but the rest of the information about the date and place of his birth, his parents, and his graduation from Sumner was, I thought, unambiguous. I had gleaned a sense of strong family ties from letters he kept from his sisters

25. “The Waltons: How It All Began” at http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/2792/ walton2.htm. 26. U.S. Census, 1880, City of St. Louis, roll 720, enumeration district 71, sheet 14. 27. Dilliard, “Lester A. Walton,” Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 7, 767.

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and parents. In a couple of speeches delivered in the 1950s, Walton alluded to neighborhood friends, trips to East St. Louis and Shawneetown, Illinois, to visit relatives, and his mother’s and sisters’ occupation as schoolteachers. In letters to St. Louis friends Walton reminisced about the days of youth. And I knew of one additional fact—the family owned land in Shawneetown, and tax receipts identiﬁed the location of the lot. There seemed to be more than enough to write about Walton’s youth, and with names, dates, and information on the land, I could ﬁnd richer details in the public records in Missouri and Illinois to ﬂesh out the story. The key piece of information was the land. It was not easy for African Americans in post-Reconstruction America to acquire and retain land. How and when had they come into possession of it, not only in Illinois, but also in St. Louis? Was the property evidence of ﬁnancial resources that served as a buffer against the travails more common for African American families in these years? Had income from this property enabled a bellmancum-janitor to eventually own a home in “the Ville,” the hub of black culture in St. Louis? Depending on the answers to these questions, several narrative possibilities presented themselves. If the land had been purchased by Olive’s relatives and willed to her, then the land symbolized the payoff for hard work and ﬁnancial management, the twin pillars of Lester Walton’s business philosophy. If it was property that the Waltons acquired together and that they used as a source of income, it could help explain how the children of a janitor could pursue educational and professional opportunities instead of ﬁnding work to supplement the family income as many of their neighbors appear to have done. There’s one other possibility, and it is both fascinating and troubling. Walton conﬁded late in life in one of his nieces that his maternal grandfather was a white banker of German extraction. Of his ﬁrst meeting with his grandfather, Walton wrote, “I later learned the signiﬁcance of my mother taking me to the bank (I think it was called Ridgeway [sic] National Bank) and I seemed to be the cynosure of all eyes. The man was very attractive and gave me money. He was my grandfather.”28 If the land came from him, what did it mean? Did the father’s concern for his daughter’s ﬁnancial well-being implant Walton’s desire for interracial harmony? Did his grandfather’s generosity soften Walton’s critique of white male privilege that supported racial, gender, and class hierarchies? Did it inspire Walton’s conﬁdence in the numerous powerful white men with whom he formed alliances and professional relationships? Or, by contrast, was it a

28. Walton to Olive, n.d., quoted in Young, “Lester A. Walton,” 39.

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haunting reminder of the racial division in the United States and a shameful emblem of sexual conquest of black women by white men? I had to abandon a biographical narrative of Walton’s life largely because I could not begin it. None of these questions are answered in extant public records or private papers. None of these narratives can be veriﬁed or falsiﬁed. The land, it turns out, is untraceable. Until relatively recently, property owners in Gallatin County, Illinois, could pay taxes on land they owned without registering it in the courthouse. Unregistered land cannot be found in a title search, and the lot number on Walton’s tax receipts is not registered.29 People who decided not to register land on which they paid taxes did so to avoid public knowledge of their acquisition. Black landholders might have pursued such a strategy as a way to cling to land, which was often taken away from them through legal or ﬁnancial technicalities. A white landholder, deeding the property to an illegitimate heir, might want to avoid public scandal. Absentee landowners with friends and relatives in the community might conceal their purchase of rental property. All of these dead ends nevertheless reveal a social system in which masks were needed and certain stories weren’t welcome. Although the mystery surrounding the Waltons’ land thwarts the narration of his childhood, it is not the only one to cloud our view of his youth. In the course of searching for land transactions, I stumbled into a world of enigmas. The ﬁrst is Walton’s mother. Dilliard called her Ollie May Camphor. Walton supplied two additional facts—his mother had been a schoolteacher, and her family could trace its lineage directly to Madagascar. All of this information is suggestive of a commitment to education and of conscious ties to a speciﬁc place in Africa, but it does not make Walton’s mother easy to ﬁnd in public records. Until she married Benjamin Alexander Walton on July 18, 1878, Walton’s mother and her family circumstances are obscured by the fog that typically shrouded interracial sex in antebellum America.30

29. In the summer of 2003, I traveled to southeastern Illinois to examine microﬁlmed copies of deed registries for Gallatin County kept in Carbondale. When I could ﬁnd no reference to either the lot number or any member of the Walton family, I went to the courthouse in Shawneetown and read the original handwritten registers for the years 1865 to 1945, after Olive’s death, when the land was willed to the surviving Walton children. There was no record. I was advised by court employees to hire someone to do a title search, and after about a half hour of preliminary research, the woman who had agreed to do the search informed me of the rules governing the registration of property. Although the tax receipts clearly showed that the Waltons paid taxes on the Shawneetown lots, the ownership of the land itself and any transfers that might have occurred could not be traced. 30. See marriage records, City of St. Louis, Missouri, 1877–1881, Mf. 929.3778, frame 320, St. Louis Public Library.

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In the 1860 census for Shawneetown, Illinois, only one person named Olive can be found—and she mostly ﬁts the description of Walton’s mother—a four-year-old mulatto child born in Illinois and living with an African American family headed by Samuel Anderson.31 Birth date and racial designation are right, but the last name is not. Still, Samuel Anderson may have been an important ﬁgure in Olive’s development. In 1852, he was one of ﬁfty-two African American property owners in Gallatin County who petitioned the state of Illinois to set aside a portion of the school tax to support schools for black children, and even though that support was not immediately forthcoming, it is clear that Anderson was an advocate for the education of African American children.32 Ten years later, however, Olive no longer lived there—or at least was not listed in the Shawneetown census. Before consulting these records, I had visited St. Peter’s cemetery in St. Louis, where Waltons’ parents are buried. A simple granite headstone marks their graves and that of their daughter Julia O. Reagin. But the cemetery records show that the plot belonged to Julia A. Brown, who in 1901 was buried there in an unmarked grave, and next to her lies Nancy Street, who preceded her in death by two years. In 1880, Nancy Street lived with Benjamin and Olive Walton and was identiﬁed in the census record as black, a grandmother and widow, and born in Tennessee. The 1900 census taker recorded Julia A. Brown as an aunt residing with the Waltons.33 31. 1860 U.S. Census, Gallatin County, Illinois, roll 180, p. 870. Typed transcripts of the census are also available, but there are some errors in transcription. 32. Jacqueline Yvonne Blackmore, “African Americans and Race Relations in Gallatin County, Illinois from the Eighteenth Century to 1870,” 214. According to Blackmore’s statistics, black children about the age of Olive were, by 1870, largely unschooled, with 85–89 percent of them being characterized as illiterate. The fact that Olive was literate and may have worked as a schoolteacher before her marriage suggests that she grew up among people who valued education and struggled to attain it. 33. Cemetery records for St. Peter’s, located on Lucas and Hunt Road in St. Louis, can be obtained from the caretaker, and they include the location, lot number, lot owner, and those individuals buried in the plot. Additional information includes age at the time of death. Adam Brown, probably an infant, was the ﬁrst to be interred in the family plot in 1888, followed by Nancy Street, age 106, buried on May 15, 1899. On June 14, 1901, sixty-nine-year-old Julia Brown was buried, followed by Benjamin A. Walton, who died at the age of seventy-nine in February 1931, Julia O. Reagin, his daughter, who was buried on July 6, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, and Olive M. Walton, buried on July 17, 1944. Olive’s age is listed as eighty-four, which would make her birth year 1860, but earlier census reports indicate that she was born sometime in the mid-1850s. All of the ages at death might be off by some years. Nancy Street, for example, was listed in the 1880 census as being seventy-four years old. But even taking into account these discrepancies, it is most likely that Julia was Olive’s aunt and Nancy was her grandmother. See also 1880 U. S. Census, Missouri, City of St. Louis, roll 720, enumeration district 71, sheet 14; and 1900 U.S. Census, Missouri, St. Louis City, Ward 26, roll T623, sheet 59A.

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I thought if I could track Nancy Street and/or Julia Brown, I might have a chance of locating Olive. In 1870, Nancy Street lived with Julia and Joseph Brown near East St. Louis, and in 1860 she resided in the home of Richard Fletcher in Shawneetown. In 1850, she lived with Cyrus Street, who at twenty-two may have been a son or nephew, and next door lived Julia A. and Jefferson Camper with two teenagers—Thomas and Nancy J. Street. Clearly, mother and daughter stayed close to one another, but they did not bring me any closer to Olive.34 By simultaneously tracking Nancy Street and Julia Brown, I stumbled upon a pattern of naming that points to Nancy J. Street as Olive’s mother. Every time I found a Nancy Street in the census, there were others just a generation apart living nearby. The ﬁrst daughter was always named Nancy, after her mother, and the second daughter was named Julia. Olive continued the naming pattern after she married Benjamin Walton—her ﬁrst two daughters were Nancy and Julia. Her daughters also replicated the pattern, but instead of naming their ﬁrst daughters Nancy, they named them Olive, after their mother. This practice might have come from Madagascar, and its persistence into the twentieth century indicates purposefulness rather than accident. But clearly, Olive represents a rupture. As Nancy’s ﬁrstborn daughter, she should have been called Nancy. The fact that her father was not married to her mother and that he was German may account for this disruption—perhaps the name signiﬁed the child’s skin color and served as a reminder of her lineage. But why she went by the last name of Camper and why she lived with the Andersons is not clear. Maybe her aunt Julia and uncle Jefferson Camper offered to raise her, and she simply kept using her uncle’s last name after Julia and Jefferson dissolved their marriage. In any case, until the Waltons registered their marriage in 1878, she eludes detection in public records, living with neither Nancy J. Street, Julia Brown, Jefferson Camper, nor the man who fathered her—the second enigma. Because Shawneetown was Illinois’s ﬁrst banking capital, quite a bit is known about its bankers. Thomas Ridgway and John McKee Peeples established the ﬁrst National Bank of Shawneetown in 1865—neither man was of German extraction. By 1872 this bank was known as Ridgway National Bank—the institution named by Walton as the site of his ﬁrst (only?) meeting with his grandfather—and the assistant cashier, W. D. Phile, had been born in Germany. Phile had advanced to cashier twenty 34. 1850 U.S. Census, Gallatin County, Illinois, roll 107, p. 392; 1860 U.S. Census, Gallatin County, Illinois, roll 180, p. 887; 1870 U.S. Census, St. Clair County, Illinois, roll 280, p. 621.

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years later and was one of the bank ofﬁcers in 1894. His ﬁrst appearance in the Shawneetown census was in 1860. Since his brother Lewis lived in the town in 1850, W. D. Phile could have joined him any time during that decade. In 1855, he married Mary A. Baker, who bore at least two of his children. In 1880, the census taker recorded his wife’s name as Nannie, a woman too young to have been the mother of the two oldest children still at home. W. D., Nannie, and two children are buried in a plot in Westwood Cemetery near Old Shawneetown, Illinois. Phile’s marriage to Mary A. Baker appears in the ofﬁcial state record of marriages; the one to Nannie does not. Having sired an African American child out of wedlock had ruined neither his marriage prospects nor his professional advancement and ﬁnancial standing. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Phile was involved in numerous land transactions in Gallatin County, amassing thousands of dollars worth of property while becoming an ofﬁcer in the bank. He certainly could have transferred land to an illegitimate daughter, deciding not to register the transfer and limiting the size of the gift so as not to compromise his social standing. Still, in truth, no public document ties W. D. Phile to anyone in Lester Walton’s immediate family— only Walton’s conﬁdential missive to a niece many years after the fact and circumstantial evidence permit speculation.35 Nevertheless, the mystery itself is in some ways revealing. The family story that could not be spoken was clearly not a happy one. Interracial sex—whether forced or consensual—was taboo, though ubiquitous, in antebellum America, and in this case it produced a child who was denied the stability of a traditional nuclear family at a time of great peril for people of color in southeastern Illinois. Located on the banks of the Ohio River, Shawneetown was a site of increasingly tense race relations in the decade 35. W. D. Phile’s headstone indicates that he was born in Stetten, Germany, on February 6, 1833, and that he died in Shawneetown, Illinois, on March 10, 1911. His wife, Nannie Phile, was born in 1843 and died in 1925. When I saw her name, I wondered if she was, in fact, Nancy J. Street, and I still would not completely rule out the possibility. The 1850 census says she was eighteen, meaning a birth year of the early 1830s. The census taker may have overestimated her age in 1850, and she may have changed her birth year if she decided to pass. If Nannie is, indeed, Nancy J. Street, she and her husband were very close in age—closer in age than is indicated on the headstone. For Lewis Phile, see 1850 U.S. Census, Gallatin County, Illinois, roll 107, p. 393; for the ﬁrst evidence of William Phile, see 1860 U.S. Census, Gallatin County, Illinois, roll 180, p. 855. The transcription of the 1860 census incorrectly identiﬁes him as William Thile. Both Lewis and William Phile reported having come to the United States from Wurtemberg; the last name, which is not German, may have been an immigration ofﬁcial’s corruption of a German surname such as Pfeil. For information about the Ridgway National Bank, see Directory, Charter and Ordinances of the City of Shawneetown, 1872, 10; and John Metzger, “First Banking Capital of Illinois: Shawneetown,” 32–36.

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preceding the Civil War. Slave traders from across the river in Kentucky began raiding communities in Illinois, kidnapping African Americans and selling them in southern slave markets. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act sparked the practice, and the Dred Scott decision in 1857 spurred it on. Even the ofﬁcial history of Gallatin County, published in 1887, acknowledged the willing collaboration of local whites in these abhorrent events. Because of the prejudices of many of the people then against the negro, and of their frequent attempts to steal them and sell them into slavery in the Southern States, great trouble frequently arose; many cruelties and outrages upon their rights were perpetrated by persons, some of whom are still living, who would, with their present enlightened view of justice, crimson to the temples to see their names published in connection with the crimes they once thought it a duty to commit, but which names frequently appear in the records of the circuit court, in indictments for kidnapping. It was frequently necessary for a free negro to prove to the court that he was free.36

“Great troubles,” “cruelties and outrages,” and “crimes” marked Olive’s youth. Was this why Olive “was taken to St. Louis at an early age,” as Walton reported in a commencement address at Lincoln High School in East St. Louis in 1951? Even ninety years later, Walton used the passive voice to elide the issue of how and with whom his mother got to the Gateway City.37 After the Civil War began in earnest, resentment toward African Americans deepened among white residents, as emancipated and very poor blacks crossed the Ohio River into Gallatin County. In the early 1860s, white women in Shawneetown made life so miserable for one Sarah Curtis, who opened a school for African American children, that she left town after only a few months.38 Race hatred, danger, and ﬂight haunted Olive May Camper Walton, and apparently the memory of white people gaping at him as his grandfather pressed money into his hand at the Ridgway National Bank haunted Lester Walton, too. It seems odd that Olive was taken to St. Louis, the principal city in a slave state. The rest of the family resettled in Brooklyn, Illinois, across the 36. History of Gallatin, Saline, Hamilton, Franklin and Williamson Counties, Illinois, 32. For a deeper discussion of the relationship between slavery and southern Illinois and of this heinous practice of man-stealing, see John A. Metzger, “The Gallatin County Saline and Slavery in Illinois.” 37. “This Changing World,” Address of the Hon. Lester A. Walton, former U.S. minister to Liberia, delivered at the midyear commencement of Lincoln High School, East St. Louis, Illinois, Thursday evening, Jan. 25, 1951, in LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 7. 38. Blackmore, “African Americans and Race Relations,” 188, 213.

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river from the Gateway City, a decision that reﬂects their awareness of that community’s history. Brooklyn, later renamed Lovejoy, was originally settled in the 1820s by eleven black families from Missouri—some free people of color, others self-emancipated slaves. The town’s motto, “Founded by Chance, Sustained by Courage,” testiﬁes to its beginnings as a refuge for African-descended people determined to be free. Long after the Civil War, Brooklyn remained predominantly black, and the Waltons visited family members who had stayed there. Olive’s name does not appear in the St. Clair County manuscript census with the Streets, the Browns, and Jefferson Camper, but taking her to this historic black town to get her out of harm’s way in Shawneetown would have made sense.39 Benjamin Alexander Walton is a no less enigmatic ﬁgure than his wife. Born a slave in Arkansas, Walton moved to St. Louis at some point before he was married. Lester Walton almost never talked about his father in public addresses, never referred publicly or privately to anyone on his father’s side of the family. In fact, Walton reported to the census taker in 1910 in New York that both his parents had been born in Illinois, implying that he was not the child of slaves. When Benjamin’s ﬁrst son was born, his employer suggested the name Lester, after Lester Wallack, a popular English actor, and Benjamin selected Aglar as a middle name in recognition of the family for whom he had worked as a young man.40 Thus, Walton knew that he had been named after two white men, neither of whom had direct ties to the Walton family. That there was some distance between father and son is indicated by the one extant letter from Benjamin to his son, distance that can be measured in time, miles, educational attainments, and sensibilities. “I have been trying since my birthday to write you a few lines,” Benjamin opened his April 2, 1918, letter to his son. It has been some time since you have heard from me not that your Father is less anxious about you and your business affair. I must at all time admire or admire your splendid courage at all times under many disappointment at time but you did not become discourage but went right on. Write you this to let you know how much your papa think about you and Family. Your papa never pray without praying that you may be bless. I shall ever continue to ask his Blessing on you and wife and children. 39. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, America’s First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830–1915, 1–46. 40. The 1870 census shows Benjamin Walton living with the family of James Aglar in St. Louis. He was one of two domestic servants living in the household. In this record, Walton’s birthplace is identiﬁed as neither Arkansas nor Illinois but Kentucky.

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May much success be my Boys. Yet lead so that the rest of children may follow example. I read many inter[est]ing in the Age about you with much satisfaction inded. Nothing could have give me more pleasure then your telegram on the night of my Birthday when I had every reason to believe you was to even busy to think of your old papa 67 Birthday. I appreciated it more then I am able to tell you on paper. I close by saying you know. Wish you much success in all of your many undertaking. This leave all well at home. Julia is doing all right but she must work hard at times. My best love your dear wife and children. Don’t let them forget me I won’t be here long now. Write me when can. Always so please to hear from you. Your Father, B. A. Walton41

After leaving St. Louis to work in New York, Walton had relatively little time or money to return home often. In 1918, he was working for the Commission on Training Camp Activities, shuttling between Manhattan and Camp Upton on Long Island, where he was working with professional and amateur performers to provide entertainment to the troops encamped there. The announcement of Walton’s appointment by the famous New York producer Marc Klaw to the “Military Entertainment Service” committee was front-page news in the Age in early December 1917, and it identiﬁed, among others, David Belasco, A. L. Erlanger, Lee Shubert, George M. Cohan, and Irving Berlin as members.42 In the months following Walton’s appointment, the Age carried numerous stories about Walton’s service, though it indicated nothing about the tenuousness of his appointment, which by September 1918 became a source of irritation to Walton. Perhaps the article that gave the elder Walton “much satisfaction” had been written by his son and had appeared on the front page of the weekly. “[T]o me the greatest of many spectacles was that of the white soldier and the colored soldier, the Jew and the Gentile, meeting on perfect terms of equality as comrades in arms and preparing, as true Americans, to give their lives if necessary, ‘to make the world safe for democracy,’” Walton wrote. “At Camp Upton one may speak of ‘Christianity’ and ‘democracy’ without mental reservation. There these terms are more than present-day shibboleths. They are not mere ﬁgures of speech.”43 Walton’s

41. B. A. Walton to Lester A. Walton, April 2, 1918, LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 1/8. 42. “Negro Member of Military Entertainment Service,” New York Age, December 8, 1917, 1, col. 1–2. 43. Lester A. Walton, “Racial Amity at Camp Upton,” New York Age, January 19, 1918, 1, col. 1–3, quote from col. 1.

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reference to Christianity and to a vision of “racial amity” coincided with his father’s commitment to the church. As his letter indicated, Benjamin Walton was a praying man who asked for blessings on his son’s endeavors. He was a stalwart in the St. James A. M. E. Church located near his home, serving as superintendent of the Sunday school program. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s pride was mixed with other elements that testify to a not completely comfortable relationship with his son—hesitation in responding to his son’s telegram, fear of being forgotten, and subtle prodding to “lead” so others would follow. Walton’s ambitions and hobnobbing with men prominent in the ﬁelds of entertainment and government contrast sharply with his father’s continued employment as a janitor, his devotion to the church and two fraternal orders in which he was a member, and his humility. The formal signature, so unlike Olive’s more familiar “Mama,” looks oddly out of place, the result perhaps of not writing many letters, not knowing the conventions, or a betrayal of the lack of intimacy between the two men. When Benjamin Walton passed away in early March 1931, Lester again was scrambling to get ahead. The New York World, where he was employed, stood on the brink of ﬁnancial collapse, and Walton was madly trying to ﬁnd more stable employment. He wrote to his friend Claude Barnett, “I was thankful that I reached St. Louis in time to talk with my father, who recognized me.” He would wait until after his mother’s death in 1944, however, before making a contribution to St. James in honor of his father, and it likely was at that time that he commissioned the headstone that marks the graves of his parents and sister.44 Because Walton wrote so little about his father and kept (received?) only one letter he penned, it is impossible to know what kind of relationship they had as father and son. They might well have denied the existence of any tension between them. But the differences between the two men betray worldviews that were not in synch with one another. Whereas Olive’s story haunted Walton, in some ways Benjamin himself was a haunting ﬁgure, because he represented an alternative to the course Walton decided to follow. Benjamin embodied a community-centered strategy in the struggle for

44. A letter from Mama to Walton, undated, in LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 8, mentions Benjamin’s membership in two fraternal lodges, one being the International Order of Odd Fellows. See C. Wayne Love to Walton, September 10, 1945, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 7, an acknowledgment of Walton’s donation to the church and a statement from Love about the high regard in which the elder Walton was held by longtime church members now more than a decade after his death. Young, “Lester A. Walton,” 39–40, provides additional information about Benjamin Walton. She argues that he was considerably better educated than many of his contemporaries, but the letter indicates that his education had been rudimentary at best.

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dignity and equality that immersed him in the African American neighborhood of the Ville. Benjamin’s appointment as a janitor, which ensured a steady income, may well have signaled political differences. One of Walton’s friends, J. Milton Turner, had led a rally for Independent Negro voters in 1898, right at a time when Walton was developing a political consciousness. In his appeal to the large and boisterous audience, Turner was reported to have exclaimed, “I am wearied with you negro voters of St. Louis. For years you have given 9,000 votes for 60 janitorships, and if you continue to do as you have done in the past, you will never gain for yourselves and for your sons the political liberty which is more valuable to you than the name of citizen, which is empty if you do not make your rights at the polls effective.”45 By the time Turner chided the black Republicans of the city, Benjamin Walton had been a janitor for sixteen years. In 1882, when he bade farewell to his job as a bellman, he also moved his family out of the crowded house on Gay Street, which the Waltons shared with Frank and Clare McKenna and their two daughters, into a single-family dwelling on Cottage Avenue in the heart of the Ville.46 Over the years, the Waltons witnessed the consolidation of African American cultural and social life in the Ville with churches, schools, a hospital, and businesses going up in their neighborhood. Had janitorships like Benjamin’s come at the expense of the political liberty of the next generation? That’s debatable. But in the early 1920s, Lester would exhume some of Turner’s arguments, including the appeal to Independent Negro voters, as he directed the publicity designed to persuade voters like his father to abandon the party of Lincoln. And behind the scenes, Walton lobbied Democratic Party ofﬁcials to get more and better patronage jobs for African Americans.47 The foundation on which Walton had built his

45. The emphasis in this passage is mine. “Telling Speech of J. Milton Turner,” St. Louis Republic, October 29, 1898, 2, col. 4. That Turner was a friend of Walton’s and that he helped shape his political sensibilities is suggested in a letter from J. Finley Wilson to Walton, September 28, 1946, in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 16/26, in which Wilson reminds Walton of the “Grand Old Days around the turn of the century,” when the two of them as well as Milton Turner, Charlie Turner, Sam Patterson, Louis Chauvin gathered to listen to the election returns. 46. The Ville is the popular name for a development in St. Louis originally named Elleardsville for the family whose land was parceled into residential neighborhoods. To gain an appreciation of the vibrancy of this neighborhood, see John A. Wright Sr., The Ville, St. Louis; Lawrence O. Christensen, “Black St. Louis: A Study in Race Relations, 1865–1916”; Daniel T. Kelleher, “St. Louis’ 1916 Residential Segregation Ordinance,” 239–48; Jo Ann Adams Smith, Selected Neighbors and Neighborhoods of North Saint Louis, 28; and Sandra Schoenberg and Charles Bailey, “The Symbolic Meaning of an Elite Black Community: The Ville in St. Louis.” 47. For Benjamin Walton’s change of jobs and change of address, compare his entries for 1881 and 1882 in Gould’s St. Louis Directory. In the campaign literature that Walton

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own future had been purchased by his father’s humble position as a janitor, his good standing in the Ville as a reliable Christian and fraternal brother, and his apparent lack of interest in the rich and famous. Walton’s neat narrative of his mother’s birth as a free person in Illinois, her education and work as a schoolteacher, and the jolly family gatherings in East St. Louis and Shawneetown hid a great deal of pain and shame behind the sentimental tropes of opportunity, success, and family. He said virtually nothing about Benjamin Walton, because that story was not one that Walton was inclined to tell. In contrast to his reticence regarding Benjamin, Walton left a loving tribute to his father-in-law, Frederick Randolph Moore. The archives document their collaboration and mutual respect. While Walton maintained contact with his sisters and mother, his life in New York revolved around the Moores’ jam-packed social and political calendar. Walton and Moore worked side by side at the Age ofﬁces, took part in the National Negro Business League, and attended or cohosted gala affairs that attracted everybody who was somebody in the African American community in the ﬁrst three decades of the twentieth century. Moore introduced Walton to key ﬁgures at Tuskegee, in the Republican Party, and from among the ranks of white philanthropy, and Moore, the editor, the black alderman, the incorruptible public ﬁgure, set the stage for Walton to gain attention in his own right. Although Moore, like Benjamin A. Walton, had been born in bondage, he refused to settle for the security and limited horizons of a janitorship. He charged up the ladder of success from the streets of the nation’s capital, where he sold newspapers as a lad, to become the owner and editor of one of the most widely read race newspapers of the early twentieth century.48 The most important introduction Moore made, however, is the one about which the archives yield relatively little. Moore’s daughter Gladys, who worked in the ofﬁces of the New York Age, married Walton in 1912, helped draft, he often mentioned the well-paid jobs Democrats made available to Negroes—and we already have seen how important his own well-paid position was to him. For a small sample, see Lester A. Walton, “Vote for Roosevelt,” 343–44; “To Colored Voters,” pamphlet issued in 1932 by the National Colored Citizens Roosevelt Committee, Arthur Mitchell Papers, box 1, ﬁle 7, Chicago Historical Society. For two letters pressing for more patronage, see Walton to James A. Farley, February 16, 1933, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 2; and Walton to James A. Farley, May 6, 1933, in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 3. 48. Lester A. Walton, “An Appreciation of Frederick Randolph Moore,” LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 17. For additional information on Moore, see “F. R. Moore, Editor, Harlem Leader, 85,” New York Times, March 3, 1943, 24, col. 3; James Egert Allen, The Negro in New York, 75–76; and John B. Wiseman, “Moore, Fred(erick Randolph),” in Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography.

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and there’s every reason to believe they lived happily ever after, celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in 1962, just three years before Walton’s death. A few letters, mostly written by Gladys, remain among Walton’s papers; he alludes to her and offers greetings on her behalf in numerous letters to friends and acquaintances. Archival remains limit what else can be said about her, their marriage and family life, and her impact on Walton’s thought and action. Gladys, too, lives in this story but in only a few brilliant ﬂashes. One would be hard-pressed to narrate her life story even as it is intertwined with that of her husband. Like every other mystery I encountered in Walton’s archives, Gladys’s cameo appearances are suggestive at best. It might be tempting to form a narrative around one of the following clichés that objectively describes the relationship between Gladys Moore and Lester Walton. He “married the boss’s daughter,” after having carried on an “ofﬁce romance,” and, given her age and his, he “robbed the cradle.” None of these narratives is particularly ﬂattering—the ﬁrst smacks of social climbing, the second hints at indiscretion, and the third suggests the stereotypical lasciviousness often associated with older men in the United States. In a sense, each contains elements of the truth. That is, the Waltons’ marriage did bind Lester to the Moores in ways that undeniably advanced his career and professional development. Their romance did begin in the ofﬁce, and although Gladys no longer worked there after her wedding day, she was familiar with the business and knew who mattered. Except for the signiﬁcant difference in their ages, nothing suggests that they were indiscreet (their ﬁrst child was born about ten months after their wedding), but the playful articles that appeared in the Age in the weeks right before they exchanged vows suggests that their love affair was no secret. Photographs of Gladys in Walton’s collection feature a conﬁdent, radiant, stylish woman, dressed in the height of fashion. Her skin is pale in the black-and-white portraits, her features bearing witness to her own mixed ancestry. No matter who her father was or where the two met, it’s not hard to imagine Walton being felled by her beauty. Walton did, indeed, marry well, and he married up. Throughout their ﬁfty-three years together, Gladys presided over social gatherings that reﬂected well on Walton’s success. In 1939, Walton wrote Claude Barnett about Gladys’s imminent departure from Monrovia, concluding simply, “My wife is very popular here and has been a great help to me.”49 She also massaged friendships with men and women who could help her husband and more than once 49. Walton to Barnett, May 24, 1939, in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1939– 1964.

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Gladys Moore Walton. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

dissuaded Walton from taking rash legal action that she believed would hurt him. As a daughter of Frederick Randolph Moore, Gladys was accustomed to rubbing elbows with inﬂuential and famous men and women; she could offer advice on how the “Colored Aristocracy” lived to someone who was not born into it.50 Gladys Walton also makes an occasional appearance as a genuine neighbor and volunteer. Walton’s journalism, which clearly limited the time he had for community work, is ﬁlled with reports on charitable events, community endeavors, and the need for local involvement. By contrast, one rarely hears Gladys’s voice, but her commitment to community is visible. She was active in the local Harlem YMCA and its programs. The couple’s 50. Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920. Gatewood does not include Frederick Randolph Moore among the aristocrats whose lives he explores, but the description of elite associations and the lineage that often included well-placed white ancestors ﬁts many of the details of Moore’s life. For a discussion of the black elite in St. Louis, see Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. Published in 1858, Clamorgan’s account predates Benjamin Walton’s arrival in the city, and as a lifelong wageworker, it is clear that Walton was not considered one of the local elite.

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ﬁnancial records show Walton to be a cautious, blue-chip investor while Gladys took chances on Harlem enterprises, like the Brown Bomber Bakery. Gladys supported local businesses and tradespeople in Monrovia while her husband preferred to ship familiar goods and clothing in from Great Britain or the United States. These glimpses of Gladys permit little more than speculation, but they do suggest that she complemented Lester’s more earnest nature. Beyond these brief, random observations, I’m not sure what else can be said about Gladys Moore Walton. She was a constant ﬁgure in his life, funloving and socially at ease. Her expectations might well have kept the pressure on Walton to seek and strive for greener pastures, but there is no extant document that records a sharp word between them. If their marriage was ever strained, nothing in the archives testiﬁes to it, and at the same time, the paucity of letters between them—though surely written, clearly not preserved—betrays little more than a comfortable relationship, affectionate but not passionate, teasing but not demeaning. Gladys undoubtedly meant much more to her husband than we can ever know. And that brings us to the ﬁnal enigma residing in the archives—Walton himself. When he prepared his own entry for Who’s Who in Colored America in 1938, he recorded his birth date as April 20, 1882, the same date that appeared in the New York Times obituary in 1965. So it was quite a surprise to see him listed as a two-year-old in the 1880 census with his parents and great grandmother. St. Louis school records show him entering the ﬁrst grade in 1884 and graduating from Sumner High School in 1897. I still am not sure when he was born, because registering births in St. Louis, like registering land in Gallatin County, Illinois, was strictly voluntary in the late nineteenth century, and his name is not registered. If the 1880 census taker recorded Lester’s age accurately, his birth would have been in 1878, three months before his parents’ marriage in July. Or 1879 is also plausible. Indeed, the 1900 census records his age as twenty-one and his birth date as April 1879. Walton attended a few days of school in May 1884; he was absent at least as many days as he was present, which suggests behavior like a youngster not quite ready to start school or a program at the end of the school year to orient the next year’s new class of students. He started school full-time that fall and was listed in the attendance register as six years old.51 Walton’s age remains, therefore, a well-guarded secret. 51. See the annual register of the No. 8 (later, Simmons) School, for the year 1883– 1884. Walton was admitted on May 7, 1884, during the fourth quarter of the school year, and appears to have attended three full days, parts of three other days, and was absent for three days. He’s listed as being age six. The register is located in the St. Louis Public School Archives.

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On the one hand, lying about one’s age is not that terrible or uncommon, and it is tempting to shrug off Walton’s decision to shave off a few years with a grin and an eye roll. But I wonder when and why he decided to say he was born in 1882. If it was merely to protect his parents, he could have added just one year. The census for 1900 not only asked for the month and year in which each member of the household had been born; it also asked married couples for the number of years they had been married. The Walton entry raises no eyebrows—husband and wife for twenty-two years; oldest child twenty-one. Walton could have given his age as twenty-six, instead of twenty-nine, when he started writing for the Age in 1908 to ﬁt in with the young entertainers of the ragtime age. Maybe he wanted to reassure his future father-in-law that the difference in age between himself and Gladys was not too great, when the two asked Moore’s blessing for their marriage. Gladys had just turned twenty-one a few months before her wedding in July 1912; Walton was thirty-three. He may not have been asked his age until he was under serious consideration for the appointment in Liberia in 1934/1935. Walton may have decided that a man in his early ﬁfties would seem more vigorous than one who was but three years from turning sixty. The only certainty is that the decision was made no later than 1938, when Walton wrote his biography for Who’s Who in Colored America. At least one additional possibility presents itself, and, if true, it suggests another haunting moment in Walton’s past. When the United States went to war against Spain in 1898, Walton was either nineteen or twenty years old, a prime candidate for military service. As an African American, he would not have been heavily recruited, but would he have some explaining to do if he were trying to pass for a white man? Missouri sent more volunteers to the war than any other state save New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio.52 Maybe not in 1898 when the war was on, but later when he began working for St. Louis dailies, might the subject have arisen? His ﬁrst best friend among St. Louis journalists—a loyal friend throughout the decades— was Herbert Bayard Swope, who also gives 1882 as the year of his birth. Did Walton simply echo his friend when the unpleasant subject came up? No one would expect sixteen-year-old boys to have volunteered for the “Splendid Little War,” even if they did admire and support Theodore Roosevelt. Although neither the mystery of Walton’s age nor his decision to adopt a later birth year can be solved, both place his youth in a slightly different light. And both testify to a self-conscious construction of identity that would bring his personal narrative into line with prevailing codes of respectable citizenship. Denying his parents’ indiscretion would make his family history 52. R. A. Alger, The Spanish-American War, 18–20.

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exemplary of the decorum implicit in the ideology of “uplift,” about which Kevin K. Gaines has written so persuasively. “Claiming respectability often meant denouncing nonconformity to patriarchal gender conventions and bourgeois morality. A sense of shame might also compel silences or revisions, producing a secretive family lore on any number of sensitive matters of parentage, disease, transgressive sexuality, or other behaviors or occurrences to which a real or imagined racial stigma might be attached.”53 An outof-wedlock birth certainly would have played into the popular turn-ofthe-century racial stereotype of sexual promiscuity as inherent in black men and women. More generally, the culture’s obsession with youth has induced many a ﬁgure in the world of entertainment to forget a few birthdays in order to prolong a career—Jack Benny’s perennial joke about being thirtynine was a humorous jab at a ubiquitous practice. And if lying about his age protected Walton’s effort to pass for white, it is not his passing that should be abhorred but the social conditions that made the denial of family and cultural afﬁliation a precondition of gaining access to the road to success or the corridors of power. The fragments of Walton’s youth scattered in the archives point toward an individual concerned with respectability, determined to succeed as the dominant culture deﬁned success, and bound in friendship to young people of both races at a time when the color line was both being deﬁned and hardening. Walton remained in close contact with several African American childhood friends in St. Louis. All of his closest friends in the black community shared his desire for respectability and success. Among his oldest and dearest friends were Araminta and Emily Parker, who lived in the Ville and who attended Sumner High School with Lester. On the occasion of Emily’s death in 1953, Walton reminded “Mint” of the regular ritual of a “talkfest” with her and her sister that visits to St. Louis always occasioned. He remembered as well how the Waltons and Parkers had rushed to greet one another every Christmas. “The happy scene,” he insisted, “will remain green in my memory.” Araminta Parker and Walton were two members of the class of 1897, and after completing the course in the Normal division, Parker joined the Sumner faculty. An extant photograph shows a modestly dressed young teacher taking her place among the older veterans from whom she had taken classes.54 53. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, 5–6. 54. Walton to Araminta Parker, December 24, 1953, and August 4, 1953, both in LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 12. Forty-Third Annual Report of the Board of, President and Director of the St. Louis Public Schools for the Year Ending June 30, 1897 (St. Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1897), 77. This and other annual reports are housed in the St. Louis Public School Archives.

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Sumner High School Faculty in 1900, including Araminta Parker (seated, far left). Photo courtesy of St. Louis Public Schools Records Center/Archives.

In addition to the Parker girls, Walton remained close to members of the Turpin family. Tom Turpin ran the Rosebud Cafe, which advertised itself as the “headquarters for Colored Professionals” in St. Louis. As a pioneering composer of ragtime, Tom Turpin gained fame as a black musician dedicated to setting down his innovative music for contemporaries and future generations to enjoy. He’s remembered as the “King of Piano,” the “real father of the blues and jazz,” and the “unsung and uncrowned master of American syncopated music.” The Rosebud Cafe was a regular stopping place for African American performers when they came to the city.55 Tom’s brother, Charles Turpin, with whom Walton enjoyed a much closer friendship, had the distinction of being the ﬁrst black elected ofﬁcial in Missouri when he became a St. Louis constable in 1910. He had worked for some years as a clerk in the assessor’s ofﬁce, however, so he was no stranger to the world of public affairs.56 After Turpin died, Walton regularly sent money for 55. See advertisement in St. Louis Palladium, October 29, 1904, 3, middle column for The Rosebud Cafe; Nathan B. Young, “The Father of the Jazz Age,” in Gerald Early, ed., Ain’t But a Place: An Anthology of African American Writings about St. Louis. 345–46. 56. Gary R. Kremer and Antonio F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage, 110; and “Theatrical Jottings,” New York Age, April 6, 1911, 6, col. 2–3. The last article tells of Turpin’s interest in reopening the Booker T. Washington Airdome as a ﬁrst-class vaudeville house, but in passing, Walton notes that Turpin “enjoys the distinction of being the ﬁrst colored man to be elected to an ofﬁce in Missouri.”

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ﬂowers to decorate his grave. He conﬁded in Turpin’s sister Nannie in 1939, “As you well know, I regarded Charlie as a big brother and our friendship, if anything, became more enduring through the years.”57 Through the Turpins, Walton undoubtedly came in contact with Scott Joplin, who performed at the Rosebud Cafe, and he became friends with the likes of Sam Patterson (with whom he cowrote popular songs), Louis Chauvin (who cowrote with Scott Joplin Heliotrope Bouquet), and J. Milton Turner, an older and politically active advocate for the political independence of Negro voters. No correspondence with any of these men, however, can be found among Walton’s papers. In 1953, the Press Club of New York awarded the ﬁrst Frankfort Press Achievement Award for advancing “the cause of harmonious racial and community relations through outstanding achievements in the ﬁelds of arts and letters, science or the social sciences,” to another of Walton’s St. Louis friends, Nora Holt. Walton gave the luncheon address in her honor. He had known Holt as Nora Douglas, the daughter of the Reverend C. N. Douglas, pastor of the St. James A. M. E. Church. Nora and Nannie Walton were playmates who kept in touch long after the Douglas family moved away from St. Louis. Walton renewed his acquaintance with Nora when she became music editor of the Chicago Defender in 1917. Holt led an extraordinary life full of travel, education, and fame—Walton recalled a lavish affair she hosted in Madam Walker’s Studio in Harlem and her work on the Amsterdam News. Perhaps most telling was his comment about a characteristic he and Holt had in common—“They [sic] do not live in the past. Our hopes are as high, our hearts as light as yesteryear. We do not compute our respective ages by the calendar. Because of advancing age we do not decree ourselves ‘old folks.’ Age is relative. In mind and body, we are today younger than some men and women of forty and ﬁfty. . . . It is a great fallacy to think everybody should look and feel very much alike at certain stages of life.” In the amended draft of this speech the ﬁnal line, “stages of life” had replaced “ages.”58 Like the Parkers and the Turpins, Nora Douglas Holt was well educated, utterly respectable, and a striver. Given their life paths, it is understandable why none of them gave away Walton’s secret. They may not have known about Walton’s friendships with white St. Louisans. Both of his white friends of long-standing were journalists—

57. Walton to Nannie Turpin Thomas, July 22, 1939, LAWPA, box 10, ﬁle 1. 58. A copy of the program, which includes a biographical sketch of Nora Holt and a description of the Frankfort Press Achievement Award, along with Walton’s amended address, are in LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 4.

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Photo of Herbert Bayard Swope signed “To Lester Walton, my friend and co-worker for many years.” Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Herbert Bayard Swope, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of the New York World, and Sid Keener, who later became a prominent sports writer in St. Louis. Swope worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a very short time at the end of the 1890s. Just out of high school and earning money as a barber, Walton may have been a stringer who supplied the Post-Dispatch with stories. Somehow they met and became friends for life—though the contrast between them could not have been more striking. Swope, a ﬁrstgeneration German American and son of a businessman, lived wildly as a teenager after his father’s untimely death and his mother’s return to Germany. He haunted the racetracks and caroused with women and drinking buddies, leaving his straitlaced older brother, Gerard, to wonder if he ever would ﬁnd a way to support himself. He was remembered at the PostDispatch as much for his drinking, ﬁstﬁghts, and ﬂashy spats as for his

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crisp, insightful writing style.59 Walton, of course, cloaked himself in respectability and strove to become part of the world of St. Louis dailies. But despite their differences, both were gregarious and talented reporters, and both were interested in shaping mass media in ways that would attract customers and advance political agendas. There’s no evidence of contact between the two after Swope left St. Louis, until the 1910s. In 1917 Swope sent Walton a short note, “Much obliged for the tip. We are going after it hard. Congratulations on your song.” One of Swope’s biographers noted that Walton’s “tip” was that Swope, by then at the New York World, should investigate President Wilson’s recalcitrant refusal to take a forceful public stand against lynching. When Walton approached Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Patrick Tumulty, to request an interview with the president on the matter of lynching, he opened his letter, “Mr. Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World, a personal friend of mine, has sent me word that he has taken up with you the matter you took up with him several days ago, to-wit—the advisability of President Wilson speaking out against the reign of mob law.” In the next couple of years, Swope and Walton collaborated on obtaining materials that would lead to the World’s historic exposé of the Ku Klux Klan, and in the years that followed, they remained in frequent contact. Walton addressed many of his letters to “Friend Swope,” and Swope informed Walton in 1938 that he kept a photograph of Walton at home, “as a constant reminder of our old time friendship.”60 Once Walton started working on the St. Louis Star, he made another friend—Sid Keener was just getting started as a clerk at the newspaper. As 59. Gould’s St. Louis Directory for 1898 lists Swope as a clerk at Schwab Company, and the following year it lists him as a reporter for the Post-Dispatch. There is no listing for Herbert Bayard Swope in 1900, but the directory was not printed until June. His biographers indicate that Swope’s youth was disrupted by the crash of 1893, in which his father lost almost everything, and by his father’s untimely death shortly thereafter. Gerard Swope disapproved of his brother’s wayward behavior and used his friendships and business contacts to get him started in a career when Herbert was still in his teens. Both biographers had access to privately held Swope papers, and both acknowledge the friendship between Walton and Swope, but neither is particularly fastidious about dating Swope’s early career. See E. J. Kahn Jr., The World of Swope, 87–103; and Alfred Allan Lewis, Man of the World, Herbert Bayard Swope: A Charmed Life of Pulitzer Prizes, Poker and Politics, 4–12. 60. Swope to Walton, January 9, 1917, LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 3; Kahn, The World of Swope, 244; Walton to Tumulty, June 12, 1918, in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 48: 302; and Swope to Walton, June 1, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle June 1938, tells of the picture. See also Walton to Dorris E. Saunders, May 19, 1953, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 20, which informs Saunders that Walton would be unable to attend the tribute to Herbert Bayard Swope to be held at the Waldorf Astoria, but he wanted to purchase a ticket so he could in some way take part. “We are close buddies, having been cub reporters on a St. Louis daily,” he wrote.

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Keener told a friend decades later, Walton was “The crack reporter . . . I was the $2-a-week ofﬁce boy” in 1902, and the older man remained a “life-long friend.” One of Keener’s responsibilities at the newspaper was to run copy from reporters at the Four Courts to the Star ofﬁce, and in 1902 it was imperative that the latest information on the corruption cases make it to the ofﬁce by noon so it could be published in the ﬁve o’clock edition of the newspaper. Walton, ten years Keener’s senior, no doubt ensured their life-long friendship when he reported on Keener’s injury in the line of duty. As one of the reporters assigned to the Four Courts, Walton depended on Keener to get his copy to the press, and it was undoubtedly the reason he saw the accident involving his admiring pal. He saw Keener “spring on behind a passing wagon which was rolling north” toward the Star ofﬁce and get his leg caught in the spokes of one of the wheels. Walton composed a vignette in which Keener showed more concern for the noon deadline than for his own injured leg. He has the lad reportedly asking the policeman who rescued him and carried him to a nearby dispensary to please make sure the manuscript was delivered on time. The accuracy of the story is less important than the gesture it represented—an experienced reporter taking an interest in an ofﬁce boy. Although there are relatively few letters from Keener among Walton’s papers, the contents point to a fond awareness of the ways their respective careers had unfolded and an abiding loyalty to one another.61 Walton’s life, longer than most people realized when he died in 1965, was bound from the beginning to boys and girls, men and women living on both sides of the color line. The fact that he felt the need to suppress such a vital piece of information as the date of his birth speaks eloquently and tragically of the power of national cultural prescriptions and debilitating racial stereotypes. Walton’s act of self-invention, like the pleasant narrative he concocted from the details of his mother’s life and like the stony silence about his father, represents a personal sacriﬁce of important markers of identity and experience that haunted him. Like amputated limbs, these details, lopped from his biography, did not disappear without an occasional reminder that they once had been part of him. Their twinges prompted Walton to remember, to keep his secrets nonetheless securely, and to write the injuries of the past into the present record. What he wrote, and what he did, which will form the basis of the remaining sections, constitute essential components of forgotten experience likewise sacriﬁced on the altar of nationalism—they, too, are memories no longer green. 61. Keener to Edward T. Brannick, January 25, 1951, and Keener to Walton, January 25, 1951, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 3; Keener is identiﬁed as a “clerk, St. Louis Star” in Gould’s St. Louis Directory for 1903. For the article on Keener, see “Had Copy for Noon,” St. Louis Star, March 26, 1902, 5, col. 3.

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The mystery surrounding Walton’s absence from the nation’s history in the twentieth century deepens in the presence of these other enigmatic ﬁgures and half-told tales. Archival research is supposed to shed light on the subject, not cast new shadows. It’s supposed to provide the raw materials for a life story that is compelling and reasonably told, not one that is incomplete and full of speculation. I want nothing more than to write Walton into existence, but these mysteries—of parents and family, of land and friends— present only possibilities, not the stuff of a deﬁnitive biography. In the end, we’re still left with a man whose story can’t be started and for many reasons hasn’t been told. At the end of my research, here is what I knew for sure: 1. Walton spent his adult life trying to improve race relations in the United States. 2. Walton represented the United States in Liberia from 1935 to 1946, when the destiny of that nation became tied to U.S. business and military interests. 3. Walton worked quietly and tirelessly after World War II to prod executives in the new communications medium of television to make visible African American experience. 4. As a New York City human rights commissioner, Walton helped enforce pioneering antidiscrimination laws. 5. At various crucial points in his life, Walton was betrayed and/or used by people he trusted. For these reasons, Walton is a man worth remembering. And when I reﬂect on the Walton I’ve come to know, I see a man who exposes race for the phony category that it is and racism for its willful protection of white privilege. I also see a culture worker savvy enough to insinuate African American issues into the public square, because he recognized that democratic consciousness must precede democracy, and such consciousness must be attuned to ethnic difference as well as common national purpose. There’s also a man who chose his allies for what they could do to further his aims, and for this Walton could be seen by men and women on both sides of the color line as a man who had made pacts with the Devil. I think Walton was a man nobody wants to remember, because telling his story shatters the illusion of their own pure and just motives. Walton, in life, was thwarted, but in death, he might just force us to face up to our collective betrayal of democracy at home and abroad and to the high personal cost of modernity.

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Part II Treachery and Duplicity

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Race Man

One of my earliest memories of an encounter with American race thinking dates from the 1960s. My parents occasionally made shopping trips to Omaha, Nebraska, seeking items unavailable in our hometown of Emerson, Iowa, or in the nearby larger towns. On this particular trip, they took my sister and me to a recently opened members-only discount department store, which sold everything from clothing to toys to automobile tires. My sister and I normally stayed pretty close to our parents on such trips—we were, after all, in the “big city.” But for some reason, I had strayed from them when I noticed two water fountains; one had a sign above it reading “White,” the other, “Colored.” I had seen what polite people in those days called “colored people,” but I didn’t make the connection between the sign above the water fountain and the dark-skinned people I saw pushing shopping carts in this store. I thought the signs referred to the kind of water that each fountain dispensed, so naturally, I went toward the “Colored” sign, curious to know how pink, blue, or green water would look and taste. Before I could be disappointed by the stream of regular water that would have ﬂowed out of this fountain, a stranger’s voice offered a sharp rebuke: “Hey, little girl, that fountain isn’t for you!” I felt the sting of denial, thinking, perhaps, only city kids had a right to see the pretty water. Later, my parents introduced me to the fundamental rule of Jim Crow America—racial difference required segregation and separate everything. A child’s innocence doesn’t last long in such an environment. Like most other Americans, I ﬁgured out how to tell one “race” from another in relatively short order. (I never wondered, until much later, what my own race 79

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might be, considering the stories older relatives had told about some Curtis ancestor in the nineteenth century having married an Indian woman.) Even decades later, after ﬁnishing college and graduate school and reading about race as a “social construction,” the residue of that earlier race thinking remained. I adopted the nomenclature—replacing colored with black and then black with African American—but deeply ingrained patterns of thought and ways of seeing die hard. Thus, the ﬁrst time I laid eyes on a photograph of Lester Walton, I had no doubt about his race. The tiny photograph that occupied the upper lefthand column of page six, where Walton’s Music and the Stage section always appeared in the New York Age, was that of a serious-looking African American man. In his columns, Walton wrote about African American stage performance from an insider’s perspective. It never occurred to me to question Walton’s race as an integral part of his identity. In fact, when I ﬁnally came to the realization that Walton’s racial identiﬁcation was both enigmatic and ﬂuid, I had to admit that my own preconceptions had served in large measure to conﬁne him to a fairly narrow range of life trajectories. By this I mean that I bought into African American history, which has developed as a ﬁeld largely out of interest in the institution of slavery. Work on slavery, Reconstruction, the emergence of segregation and disfranchisement, and a century-long civil rights struggle revolves around a master plot of unequal power between blacks and whites in the United States. Efforts designed to create equality—whether through politics, social activism and protest, the arts, or education—presuppose that African Americans are the underdogs ﬁghting against a system erected by white people for their own beneﬁt. While that view is not entirely wrong— the beneﬁts that accrue to “whiteness” are well documented—such a tightly constructed system provides limited ways of imagining African American success, power, and inﬂuence.1 Perhaps even more damaging, these narrative frames prevent us from listening attentively to historical subjects for their own understanding of who they were and of what race meant. They keep us from seeing with fresh eyes how problematic race thinking can be. Walton was far from unique in the mixed ancestry manifest in his light complexion and European facial features. But I don’t believe that his deﬁance of easy racial categorization alone has made him unwelcome in the pages of U.S. history. Think of Walter White, the blond-haired, blue-eyed 1. George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” 369–87; and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.

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Portrait of Walton from a 1909 column in the New York Age.

NAACP leader; Adam Clayton Powell Jr., elected in 1944 as Harlem’s ﬁrst black Congressman; or Rosa Parks—all have secured places in the annals of twentieth-century U.S. history and the struggle for equal rights. We see them through the prism of their rhetoric and action; and in spite of their physical traits, they appear as race leaders. By contrast, Walton displayed more caution, preferring to get results through persuasion and private pressure rather than ﬁery speeches and public demonstrations. Does this prism make us see him differently as more suspect or less committed to “the race”? Is that why we pay attention to Walton’s dramatic criticism in the New York Age, where the context is clearly “black” and his denunciations of “colorphobia”

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particularly sharp, and downplay or ignore his work as a diplomat, his tenure as president of the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers, and his nine years on the New York City Commission on Human Rights, where he actually exerted power and inﬂuence? The very fact of posing questions that situate race in particular social contexts indicates its slipperiness as a concept. Walton’s race is one of many reasons he has been forgotten, although I’m still not sure that it is the most important. I don’t want you to jump to the conclusion that his race bore a simple, straightforward relationship to his life, his sense of who he was, or why he’s been forgotten. He’s not merely the victim of prejudiced people who looked through or past him or decided self-consciously to demean him. Walton’s complex racial status begs exploring, because it was not singular. And in the process of discussing this aspect of his life, we must reﬂect on the way history is made and texts speak. Walton helps us see how and why race matters. I want to begin with my initial assessment of Walton. I don’t think I erred in believing him to be a “race man”—it’s just that that’s not the whole story. As Americans understood the term through much of the twentieth century, Walton was, indeed, a race man, interested in cultivating race consciousness and race pride in order to challenge the pervasive, dominant view that African Americans were inferior and incapable of anything more than second-class citizenship. Race men were neither “agitators” nor “subversive inﬂuences,” as Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake described them in their 1945 Black Metropolis. They were achievementoriented, eager to demonstrate excellence in some ﬁeld of endeavor, and hopeful that “the success of one Negro” would be interpreted as “the success of all.”2 Race men, like Walton and his friend W. E. B. Du Bois, were concerned with providing “moral uplift” by setting examples of diligence, cultivation, thrift, and moral living, and their work in recent years has been subject to criticism for reinforcing both patriarchy and racism and for ignoring class divisions brought about through social structures beyond the control of most African Americans.3 But through most of the twentieth century, to be a race man was to be an advocate for racial equality, to be a leader, and to challenge the debilitating stereotypes, Jim Crow policies, and extralegal violence against African Americans that seemed to have the sanction of the state. Walton’s participation in the National Negro Business League and later support for the NAACP legal defense fund, his 2. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, 390–94. 3. Hazel Carby, Race Men; and Gaines, Uplifting the Race.

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exposés of discrimination in New York theaters, and his determination to stand out in his ﬁeld all situate Walton squarely within the fraternity of race men. At the time of his death, Walton was remembered as the man responsible for the campaign to persuade newspapers to capitalize the word Negro. Little commentary accompanies this claim to fame. Indeed, by 1965, when it appeared in Walton’s obituary, capitalizing Negro seemed like a minor achievement that had left the bloody work of freedom to activists, marchers, and radicals who insisted that “Black is beautiful.” But it clearly mattered deeply to Walton. Walton’s archives are spotty and haphazard for the years preceding this campaign; from 1913 on one ﬁnds in Walton’s papers evidence of action and self-conscious record-keeping. Then, as managing editor of a “leading Negro newspaper,” as his letterhead announced, asking to be considered a Negro, Walton declared himself a race man.

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Chapter 3 Capitalizing Negro

The campaign began about a month before Walton’s ﬁrst child, Marjorie May, was born. Walton sent a letter on April 21, 1913, to the Associated Press, asking its members to “help clarify matters” pertaining to racial classiﬁcation and terminology. In the opening paragraph, he asserted that the recent federal census’s deﬁnition of race showed that “the United States Government seems to be confused on the subject—What is a Negro?” The Census Bureau “deﬁned as Negroes those who were black,” but the “majority of my people,” Walton insisted, were not black. Negro as an abstract reference to a particular color, the usual reason given for not capitalizing the word, was a misleading and inaccurate term. It meant “nothing more than when you mention that a Caucasian is ‘white.’” Walton’s solution to this problem was to capitalize Negro so that it would stand as a racial appellation not a color—it would be the equivalent of Indian, Japanese, Italian, and Chinese.1 Walton raised an intriguing question to a gathering of professional journalists whose work, he believed, could cultivate an understanding of race that affected millions of citizens’ sense of identity. Embedded in this seemingly simple, modest request lay ideas about the meaning still contentious in the twenty-ﬁrst century. Walton rejected simplistic deﬁnitions based on 1. Walton to the Associated Press, April 21, 1913, LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 1.

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phenotype as “blood.” Mostly, he questioned the idea of skin color as the deﬁning marker of race. “Why not refer to the term ‘Negro’ as a race of people and not with regard to the color of one’s skin?” he asked. “Then the term would embrace blacks, mulattoes and all of mixed parentage; for there are millions who are of various shades of brown; there are millions who are mulattoes and near mulattoes; and there are thousands who are as white as any Caucasian.” But it is important to note that he was not rejecting the idea of a racial distinction. He was instead trying to ﬁnd a way of talking about peoplehood that acknowledged descent—“parentage”— and common experience—“a struggling people.” Having opened his letter with the “genealogical mixup” in the U.S. Census Bureau, Walton insinuated citizenship into the discussion, referring to “my race in this country” and reminding the journalists that American Negroes were not African and that not all were black-skinned. Ultimately, the letter was very personal—Walton used the phrase “my race” seven times throughout the one-page letter, and in each case it referred not to himself but to the people who shared his condition, community, and institutions, binding his fortunes to theirs. Capitalization marked nations and races with respect. Walton’s call for a capitalized name to describe his race was a demand for equality. In 1913, discussions of race revolved around the relative capacities and levels of civilization assigned to each race, conﬂating a category of identity with inequality. The academic study of race at that time was dramatically inﬂuenced by the ethnographic studies conducted by Franz Uri Boas and his students. Du Bois insisted in 1909 at the National Negro Conference that “the whole argument by which Negroes were pronounced absolutely and inevitably inferior to whites was utterly without scientiﬁc basis” thanks to Boasian studies of race. A few years later in 1915, George Washington Ellis would argue that skin color had “little or nothing to do with the capacity of mind or the moral quality of the soul.”2 But popular thinking was shaped by anthropological exhibits like the Dahomeyan Village at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 or the Igorots at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, at which visitors were invited to see representatives of primitive people untouched by the elevating hand of civilization. Regardless of what scientists had to say about race, popular culture maintained older notions of racial hierarchy.

2. Du Bois and Ellis are quoted in Vernon J. Williams Jr., Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries, 43, 45. See pages 37–53 for the larger context of the new study of race in the early twentieth century.

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Walton’s desire to get the newspapers to capitalize Negro sprang from his realization that the daily was a “powerful medium” through which the ﬁndings of the new ethnographic science could be disseminated. He wanted the Associated Press to instill a different way of thinking about race, identity, and individual capacity—“the color of one’s skin does not determine character or intelligence”—by adopting the term Negro as a sign of difference but also of respect. On April 26, 1913, the New York Times published the letter Walton had sent to the convention of the Associated Press, then being held in New York. But aside from this notice, no other action was taken, and few newspapers made the change. Walton, however, refused to let up. In the summer of 1913, Walton’s campaign took on even greater urgency when the newly inaugurated president, Woodrow Wilson, sanctioned the introduction of Jim Crow practices in the nation’s capital. Walton ﬁred off a series of letters to the editor of the New York Times that critiqued important elements of the race thinking that now prevailed at the highest level of government in spite of faulty logic and scientiﬁc evidence to the contrary. Taken together, these letters, on which the campaign to capitalize Negro was built, represent the closest thing to a coherent statement on the meaning of race, the nature of race relations in the United States, and his increasingly ardent embrace of his role as a race man that one can ﬁnd in Walton’s many writings. The ﬁrst letter appeared in August on the heels of the Wilson administration’s announcement that Madison R. Smith, a white Missourian, had been named U.S. minister to Haiti. At a moment when public ofﬁcials decried the mixing of black and white Americans as an unwarranted presumption of “social equality,” the president removed an African American, H. W. Furniss, from his position as the ofﬁcial U.S. representative in Haiti. Among Smith’s duties, Walton noted, would be “to fraternize with the black people of Haiti. Mr. and Mrs. Smith will not only be entertained around the festal board, but they will have to entertain the Haitians.” Implicitly, Walton wondered why social equality of the races abroad was looked upon with favor while in the United States every measure—including segregating government ofﬁces, refusing to appoint African Americans to any position that might involve supervising whites, and introducing the “disgrace” of segregated trains in the capital city—was being taken to ensure social inequality at home. Walton found the inconsistency “bewildering.”3 3. “Colored Appointees: Negro Editor Questions Wilson Administration’s Consistency,” New York Times, August 14, 1913, 8, col. 7.

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The second letter, written the following month, responded to a Times article on the new U.S. minister in Haiti that reported sympathetically on Haitians of “mixed blood.” The Times article indicated that mulattoes in Haiti could distinguish themselves because heredity, environment, and education were more important determinants of success in life than dark skin. Moreover, such mixed-race people (presumably because of the Caucasian blood) were “sensitive” to social “slights, real and apparent.” Walton congratulated the editor for expressing these views so “intelligently and logically.” He then proceeded to wonder how an argument applied to people in another country does not apply to Negroes in the United States. “Just as you say,” he wrote, “‘intelligent Haitians want their republic to be treated as other countries are treated,’ so do the millions of colored Americans want to be treated in their republic as other citizens are treated. They do not believe that whether they be white, black, brown or yellow there should be any partiality shown. For we, too, are possessed with ‘superior ability, education and ambition,’ just as are the Haitians to whom you refer.”4 The ﬁnal letter in the series, published in November, commented on the General Episcopal Convention being held in New York, where delegates had decided to shelve a proposal to elect Negro bishops to serve in predominantly Negro dioceses in the South. Opponents of the measure objected to the prospect of white ministers taking conﬁrmation instruction from African American bishops. Others “did not believe that the Negro had developed sufﬁciently to justify giving him jurisdiction over his own people,” a belief grounded in the idea of racial hierarchy. Walton responded to these “refutable statements” with a muckraking move designed to expose the actual facts of African Americans’ leadership ability. He wrote of the “thousands of educators throughout the United States who are serving as principals and teachers in our separate schools with marked success,” “the AME Church, the AME Zion Church, and the Baptist church,” the denominations with the largest number of black members, “solely under the supervision of Negroes,” and the appeals made to the “colored preacher” by politicians in search of African American votes. The charge that the race lacked experienced, able, and trusted leaders simply ﬂew in the face of circumstances as they existed.5 Walton was trying to theorize African American success and leadership as possibilities linked to family, environment, and education and not

4. “Colored Americans: Susceptible as Haitians of Mixed Blood to Reﬁning Inﬂuences,” New York Times, September 25, 1913, 12, col. 7. 5. “Negroes as Bishops: Race Issue Is Raised in the Southern Dioceses,” New York Times, November 12, 1913, 8, col. 7.

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denied a priori because of biology or phenotype. He also wanted to expose the logical ﬂaws of U.S. racism, which was built on popular ideas rather than scientiﬁc observation. But unlike the men and women now best known for the scholarship on American Negroes—Du Bois, Kelly Miller, and Alain Locke, to name but three—Walton sought to transform popular thought by focusing on mass media. As a journalist, he used professional ties and insider knowledge of newspapers to plant different terms and ideas that would come to represent the common sense of the society. Walton’s four letters from 1913 encapsulate the forces that drove him as a race man for the next ﬁve decades—the logical necessity of social equality, the demand for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, the cultivation of an international perspective on race relations, and mass media as crucial sites for the circulation of culture in the twentieth century. But they also represent only the tip of the iceberg of his activism. Private conversations with fellow journalists, notes of praise when editors introduced positive changes, and steady behind-the-scene pressure—these were Walton’s principal tactics. They eventually produced the desired result, but they also guaranteed him a place in the shadows. In fact, when, in the 1940s, it was routine journalistic practice to capitalize Negro, the New York Times gave credit for initiating the change to Lester Aglar Watson—even though at the time, Walton was representing the United States in Liberia and was a public ﬁgure of some note.6 In an important sense, this narrative is as much my memory of Walton as it is the narrative of his thought, even though many of the words are his. Indeed, as a narrative it doesn’t do justice to the chaotic experience of race, the quotidian indignities Walton bore at times with grace, at times with ﬁerce, visceral outrage. It boils down to a handful of paragraphs a lifelong struggle to make sense of his identity and purpose. This narrative also fails to do justice to my memory of Walton and the inner turmoil that occasionally spilled onto the page. Having spent so much time with Walton, listening for his voice, retrieving from archival crevices stories he did not want to air, I have witnessed some of his encounters with hatred, betrayal, insults, and denigration. Moreover, for some dimensions of Walton’s pain and my memory of it, there is only imagination. No documents, for exam6. Walton to Charles Merz, editor of the New York Times, January 12, 1945, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 18. In November 1944, the Times published an article called “Negro Foreign Word” in which H. L. Mencken wrote: “The word Negro is now capitalized by most American publications, and in this movement to achieve ‘the true pioneer seems to have been Lester Aglar Watson, a colored journalist, who was made Minister to Liberia in 1935.’” Walton brought the error to the attention of the editor and asked that a correction be published.

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ple, survive to explain how he felt in 1916 when William Willcox, president of the New York Board of Education, refused to support Walton’s campaign to capitalize Negro. It would be easy to make the change in textbooks, Willcox agreed, but “it would be an unwise move to force discussion of the matter.”7 Willcox offered no rationale; he simply denied a request that could have been granted with ease. Although Walton did not always express directly his inmost grasp of being a Negro in the United States, even he could not contain the memories that welled up from his depths. Traces appear even in these four letters. Like “the better class of Haitians,” Walton explained, “[o]ur mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, who are educated and reﬁned” feel “the cruel sting of racial discrimination.” Segregated trains and theaters were “inferior,” “unfriendly,” and they “humiliate and embitter.” Government employees holding jobs won through the merit system and having proven their trustworthiness “may go about at work with smiling countenances, but their hearts bleed to think that they are compelled to work in the various departments at Washington under ‘Jim Crow’ rules.”8 In each of these examples, Walton reveals personal pain. He took great pride in his mother’s, wife’s, and sisters’ educational attainments and reﬁnement and would see to it that his baby daughter would have the same advantages. He resented that they experienced the “cruel sting” of disrespect and that he could not protect them from it. He knew ﬁrsthand what it meant to ride in a Jim Crow car, to proceed to the second balcony to see a good show, and to be stuck in the bleachers to watch a baseball game in St. Louis. And like many of his generation, Walton knew how to display congeniality as a mask to cover a heart and spirit wounded by employers who let race cloud their judgment. My original way of seeing Walton is a legacy of a particular deﬁnition of race that has been in vogue for centuries and that has given rise to a history of race relations that focuses primarily on difference, conﬂict, and subjugation of darker-skinned people by lighter-skinned people in the United States. It also came about because of the circumstances under which I ﬁrst met Walton. I am a white historian, and I was curious about a drama critic writing weekly columns about African American performers in a prominent African American newspaper. I assumed that race issues dominated his thinking in the same way that it colored his writing. I ﬁgured he had always been unambiguously black and remained so until the end of his

7. Willcox to Walton, June 17, 1916, LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 1. 8. “Colored Americans: Susceptible as Haitians of Mixed Blood to Reﬁning Inﬂuences.”

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life, when the New York Times included the following passage in his obituary: “Soft-spoken and bespectacled, Mr. Walton moved in and out of careers with dexterity and ease. His single goal, however, remained the same—Negro equality.”9 The last sentence so perfectly coincided with my assessment that I never thought to consider what the ﬁrst sentence might mean. But as time passed and I got to know Walton more intimately, I began to recognize that the ﬁrst sentence probably is the more revealing. “Dexterity,” “ease,” and multiple careers signify social ﬂuidity one would imagine to be difﬁcult in a rigid racial order. And the “however” indicates incongruity between professional mobility and commitment to “Negro equality.” In the process of coming to terms with the relationship between Walton’s career moves and convictions, I started to see how his racial ambiguousness has contributed to his disappearance and to the difﬁculty of telling his life story. Walton was a race man alright, but the kind who believed race should not eclipse the numerous other ways we say who we are. His mistake (if it can be called this) was in acting as if this imagined universe already existed. He would pay dearly for that error by facing treachery and betrayal and by being forgotten. It was not until I saw pictures of his face that I recognized how race helped make Walton a ghost.

9. “Lester A. Walton, Ex-Envoy, Is Dead,” New York Times, October 19, 1965, 43.

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Chapter 4 Pictures of His Face

Although dead now for more than four decades, Walton still can be seen in public art, printed matter, and private photographs. Media-wise from beginning to end, Walton posed comfortably and frequently before the camera’s eye. He always made certain to have professional photographic portraits on hand should the need for one arise. Walton’s papers testify to the frequency of sittings for and sending of publicity photos, but the only images one can ﬁnd are in the newspaper clippings and two scrapbooks— grainy, yellowed newspaper images from his career as a diplomat and human rights commissioner. A separate photograph collection contains some of the originals as well as a handful of snapshots taken both before and after Walton’s stint in Liberia. Rather late in my research, I studied these pictures of his face and began to see just how slippery race can be and how the ambiguous ﬁgure in these images might cast doubt on Walton’s status as a race leader worthy of attention. By far the most common representations of Walton are studio photographs taken for professional or publicity purposes. Numerous black-andwhite mattes document Walton’s carefully crafted persona over the years, capturing his attention to fashion trends and the natural aging process in which his close-cropped hair receded to a barely detectable fringe and smooth dark eyebrows gave way to bushy, frosted brows shading agepuffy eyes. These portraits illustrated newspaper stories about Walton or magazine articles he wrote. One even graced the cover of the Crisis in 1935, 91

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Portrait of Walton, circa 1929. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

the year Walton accepted the appointment as U.S. minister to Liberia. In all of them, Walton wears a suit, white shirt, and dark or patterned necktie. He is impeccably groomed and usually unsmiling, and his skin tone varies from very light to medium brown, a product, I suspect of different lighting used by the photographer and of the quality of photographic reproduction available to the magazine or newspaper. When one stumbles upon an image of Walton in a newspaper, magazine, or yearbook, the face does not immediately register as that of a colored, black, Negro, or African American man. The shape of his head, nose, and mouth seems more characteristic of southern Europe than of subSaharan Africa. He certainly reﬂects none of the stereotypical features that Americans have been programmed to see in the ﬁgures of Africandescended people: no ﬂat, broad nose, no thick, protruding lips, no tightly kinked hair, no sloping forehead, and no ill-ﬁtting clothes. But there’s

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Publicity photo of Walton. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

rarely a question about the race to which he belongs, because in situ verbal information supplies the mark of race that Walton’s body does not. In the New York Age and the Crisis, for example, portraits of Walton are accompanied by ﬁrst-person plural possessive pronouns in the former and a short article celebrating the new Negro appointee in the latter. His portrait in the St. Louis Sumner High School yearbook, Maroon and White, in 1965 is captioned “A Distinguished Sumnerite,” and the accompanying essay links him not only to the school’s all-black past but also to organizations like the Negro Actors Guild and the Coordinating Council for Negro Performers and to his success in getting American periodicals to

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Publicity photo of Walton. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

capitalize “Negro.” The arrangement of his article in Current History in 1929 did not altogether successfully cue readers as to Walton’s race. The article is entitled “Liberia’s New Industrial Development,” and his portrait is situated opposite the title page. The caption does not indicate his position as a feature writer on the New York World, a position unlikely to conjure an African American. He is identiﬁed simply as “Former Managing Editor, The New Age,” which, because of the omission of “York,” left Walton ﬂoating in racial ambiguity.1 Without the verbal accessories, Walton’s image conveys professionalism, material comfort, middle-class sta-

1. See the cover of the Crisis for October 1935. Copies of Maroon and White can be found in the St. Louis Public Schools Archives, St. Louis, Missouri; Walton’s portrait and the accompanying article are in the 1965 edition on page 24. Lester A. Walton, “Liberia’s New Industrial Development,” 108–9.

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Walton, then U.S. minister to Liberia, on the cover of the Crisis, October 1935. Photo courtesy of the Crisis Publishing Company.

tus, and general good looks, though it doesn’t mark him unequivocally as white or black. But the subjects of many of the articles illustrated by his portrait don’t really ﬁt the requirements of race leader as they have come to be understood. The piece in Current History touts Harvey S. Firestone’s investment in Liberia as the catalyst for “a historic and remarkable metamorphosis” of the African republic.2 Anti-imperialists, then and now, 2. Walton, “Liberia’s New Industrial Development,” 108.

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might well see him as a cat’s paw for white U.S. business interests reaping untold fortunes from the exploitation of Africa and Africans. Similarly, at the time of his appointment as U.S. minister, readers of the Crisis might have regarded Walton as a “token” in the State Department of an administration that had yet to deliver much relief to African Americans. Indeed, when Walton’s face graced 1940 newspaper accounts of FDR’s decision to distribute positions in the labor battalions according to percentage of the population, he was the mouthpiece of the government, not a voice of dissent from a Democratic regime that refused to sponsor antilynching legislation, to desegregate the armed forces altogether, and to ensure equal access to jobs in wartime industries that were, at the time, gearing up for large-scale production.3 If one is determined to believe that the struggle for civil rights succeeded only or primarily because of direct confrontation, it’s not only more convenient but also requisite to view the Lester Waltons of the United States with eyes wide-shut as “Oreos,” sell-outs, and inconsequential to the history of these socially transformative decades. For those in the opposite camp, who look back on the pre-civil rights era as the “good old days” or who credit liberal whites with the most important advances in the cause of racial equality, Walton remains outside the narrative because of his race. After all, it was Firestone who “helped” Liberians and FDR who protected black troops; Walton was just the messenger boy. A handful of private photographs—that is, photographic portraits not meant for public view—do little to alter this perception of Walton. One of these appears to be from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when Walton still had enough hair to justify a part. Even in this early portrait, Walton wears a white dress shirt, suit coat, and vest, suggesting the trappings of middle-class, professional standing. Cut in the shape of an oval, the photograph appears to have been a keepsake—perhaps a gift to his parents or to Gladys.4 Similarly, a portrait made by James VanDerZee is also cut in the shape of an oval and features a slightly older Walton, with receding hairline, posed in a crisp new suit, starched white collar, and dark tie. The undated photograph is not in the Walton photographic collection but appears in a published volume devoted to exploring and, in an important sense, introducing late-twentieth-century readers to the art of someone, who, like Walton, spent much of the century as a forgotten man. One

3. See for example, “Labor Troops Not to Exceed Ten Percent, Walton Is Assured,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 21, 1940, 1, 10. 4. The photograph is in Lester A. Walton Photograph Collection, hereinafter LAWPC, box 1, folder Lester Walton Portrait, 11277.

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Walton as a young man. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

of VanDerZee’s chief biographers describes him as “the photographer of choice for Harlem’s most distinguished residents” and his work as “an overt celebration of black middle-class life and evidence of a commitment to creating a positive self-image of migrants who found their way to Harlem.” In VanDerZee’s photographs, “the degradations of the past have been seemingly eliminated from their present lives.”5 By hiring VanDerZee to photograph him, Walton joined the rush of clients in Harlem’s middle class seeking to be invented visually as suave, sophisticated, urbane, and prosperous. Judging from the absence of props and elaborate settings, Walton’s portrait likely was made sometime early in VanDerZee’s career—sometime between 1905 and 1917, the year he opened his ﬁrst independent studio, and probably no later than 1920. Both 5. Deborah Willis-Braithwaite, VanDerZee, Photographer: 1886–1983, 8, 10–11.

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VanDerZee’s studio on 135th Street and the New York Age ofﬁces nearby were located near the center of Harlem’s political, intellectual, and cultural life, and their proximity to each other might account for Walton’s decision to be photographed by a rising star in the ﬁeld of portraiture. The Walton in the VanDerZee portrait is the same Walton who in the late 1920s represented the Dunbar Apartments as a housing development available only to those whose “character and economic status” could stand up to “close scrutiny”—even though the New York Times described them as “model tenement houses for negro [sic] families in Harlem,” a product of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s philanthropy. As one of the residents of the last of the buildings constructed, Walton clearly wanted to portray them—like himself—as thoroughly up-to-date and classy.6 Call it invention or call it pretension, but the larger context of this private photograph gives us an idea of how Walton wanted to be seen while the image itself shows us his features. One ﬁnal undated private photograph offers another example of Walton’s hard-to-read racial identity. Taken during his time in Liberia, the small oval-cut portrait is a torso shot of Walton in a light-colored suit, white shirt, and dark tie. Uncharacteristically, Walton’s eyebrows are knit together in a scowl. One additional element casts a literal and ﬁgurative shadow on the U.S. minister to Liberia. A white pith helmet simultaneously creates a gleaming white halo around Walton’s face and casts shade that obscures his countenance. Light illuminates his right cheek; the shadow swallows the left side, save the sparkle of his eye, in blackness. The portrait is a study in unsettling contrasts. Light frolics with darkness to shroud Walton in mystery. The usually jovial diplomat here peers grimly from beneath the rim of his hat. Walton’s oft-stated goal in these years was to save Liberia as the last independent republic governed by black people, yet he has donned the symbolic garb of the colonial ruler. He looks for all the world to be a “great white hunter.” There’s no doubt that Walton wore a hat like this while living in Monrovia—most Americo-Liberian men wore some kind of protection like this from the blazing equatorial sun. But there’s also something sly about the pose—something that suggests both a joke and a purposeful desire to play with the usual race thinking. To read this photograph as evidence of Wal6. Ibid., 43; Lester A. Walton, “Negro Families Buy Up Rockefeller Apartments,” New York World, March 11, 1928, E-9, col. 5–7; “Andrew J. Thomas Files Plans for Rockefeller Model Flats,” New York Times, October 19, 1926, 50, col. 4; “Thomas Files Plans for Model Tenements,” New York Times, October 23, 1926, 19, col. 8. “Plans Filed for New Unit of Model Flats in Harlem,” New York Times, November 20, 1926, 32, col. 2, reports on plans to build six-story buildings between 2580 and 2594 Seventh Avenue; the Waltons lived at 2588 Seventh Avenue.

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Lester A. Walton in Liberia. Photo courtesy of Karen Day Selsey.

ton’s deﬁance of stereotype is possible but not convincing. More startling than his attire is the look on his face—the frown, not the hat, is the feature out of place. Why would he lead with the chin for a picture he sent to relatives in the United States? They knew why he was in Liberia, what he hoped to accomplish, and why such a hat was both practical and essential. Assuming the stance of the stereotypical “great white hunter” with his exaggerated seriousness and snow-white safari hat let Walton comment on the men who wore such clothing without any sense of irony and at the same time to distance himself from their mind-set. It is a performance that reminds me of black performers who corked up as a way of making fun of white people trying to be black or of George Walker donning a wild, woolly wig, strings of beads and shells, and Broadway’s idea of “primitive” dress, pretending to be “African.”7 Walton sent this picture to his sister-in-law, Marion Moore Day, who would have gotten the joke in a heartbeat, for she knew him as a man who loved to laugh—not one to glower—and the joke of the picture is on the whites whose exploits in Africa would have been comical had they not also been destructive and oppressive. 7. For an excellent discussion of the African American blackface minstrel performance as a joke at the expense of white blackface minstrelsy, see James H. Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks in the ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” 450–71. To view a photograph of George Walker in his “African” costume, see Riis, Just before Jazz, 92.

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The public and private photographs of Walton show how visually unstable race can be and how much additional coding was needed to make him “black.” They also reveal a man fully conscious of the ways to convey aspects of his identity that were not about race—his status as a middleclass professional, his taste in clothing, and his sense of humor. When I look at the images of Walton that I have accumulated over the years, I can’t suppress feelings of both sympathy and admiration as I see in his countenance the tell-tale signs of aging we all have to face—taut, glowing skin giving way to wrinkles and bags, hairlines receding and fading into gray—and yet the grace and conﬁdence with which he endured such mortal betrayal. The green pliable sapling that was Walton’s spirit and that he kept alive in his memory never withered and cracked—only the ﬂeshy shell succumbed to the ravages of time. One public visual record of Walton remains, frozen in time for more than six decades. In 1940, Walton was in the United States, on leave from his post in Monrovia, and delivered a few remarks at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new building to house the ofﬁce of the Recorder of Deeds in Washington, D. C. A few years later, William Edouard Scott, one of the most prominent African American painters in the country at the time, was commissioned to commemorate the event on canvass. “The Groundbreaking,” ﬁnished in 1944, still hangs in the ofﬁce of the recorder in the building at the corner of 6th and D streets. In it, people who took part in the ceremony on September 26, 1940, are represented. Walton is among them. I learned about the existence of this painting, not because it is famous (it isn’t) but because of a letter sent by the recorder of deeds, William J. Thompkins, to the ofﬁces of the New York Age that I found among Walton’s papers in New York. The letter, dated June 2, 1943, asks for a photograph to be sent to “Edouard Scott” of Chicago, who will paint a mural in honor of the ceremony in 1940.8 I made a note to myself: “See if this can be found!” A couple of months later in Washington, D. C., I took a break from the National Archives reading room and made my way to the nearby Recorder of Deeds Building, determined to see this mural and to share Walton’s glory at being memorialized in a signiﬁcant piece of public art. The “mural” does not adorn the ﬁrst-ﬂoor public space of the Recorder of Deeds Building, now considered one of the most important sites for African American history and art in the capital. In fact, it is not a mural at all—rather a framed canvass that hangs in the recorder’s ofﬁce on the second ﬂoor. When I was permitted to view it, I did so with great anticipation. But the 8. William J. Thompkins to editor of the New York Age, June 2, 1943, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 16/25.

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The Groundbreaking by William Edouard Scott. Photo courtesy of Larry Todd, recorder of deeds, Washington, D. C.

moment I stood before the painting, I knew something was wrong; I did not readily ﬁnd Walton’s face in the rows of men clustered around the immediately recognizable Franklin D. Roosevelt. I studied the canvass, scrutinizing momentarily the face of each man. Finally, I recognized the characteristically round face, bald pate, and bushy eyebrows of the U.S. minister to Liberia, posed just above the president’s right shoulder. There was Walton, properly clad, a bit shorter than the others, but his cheeks were tinged with pink! In his moment of glory, Walton appeared to be white.9 9. The ﬁrst time I viewed the painting was in 1996, and I am grateful to the assistant who let me into the recorder’s unoccupied ofﬁce to have a look at it. I asked if a reproduction of the image was in existence and was told that none was available. Nine years later, I returned to the Recorder of Deeds Building and viewed the painting again, this time with the current recorder, Larry Todd, who shared with me information that he had gathered on the painting. Since taking ofﬁce, Todd has opened the building every February during Black History Month for regularly scheduled public tours that introduce schoolchildren, families, civic organizations, and ordinary citizens to the artistic

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From a formal standpoint, “The Groundbreaking” captures the tension of 1940s race relations. The American ﬂags and the two shafts of light that form a “V” at the center of the ﬁeld just below Roosevelt signify national unity in a time of war. But little else unites the individuals gathered on the reviewing stand. There doesn’t seem to be any single point of reference— light illuminates the faces from all angles, and each man and woman seems to be in his or her own world, gazing in a different direction, not at a presumed spectacle before them, into a camera lens, or at the artist rendering their faces for future generations. Roosevelt and Thompkins share a private joke, but everyone else seems indifferent to or unaware of their banter. And in a painting meant to commemorate a moment when blacks and whites joined in the same ceremony and shared the same platform, the only two dark-skinned ﬁgures are nearly hidden in the shadows—the Reverend Arthur Fletcher Elmes, who delivered the invocation, appears at the far left of the canvass; the Reverend Solomon Lightfoot Michaux, who pronounced the benediction, appears in proﬁle just right of center in the very back row. The new building was meant as a reward to Thompkins, the African American recorder who had turned a $40,000 deﬁcit into a $40,000 surplus in just seven years. The painting, however, inscribes more widely held views about the appropriate place for African Americans in the United States.10 Scott found himself in a tricky position when he accepted the commission to paint “The Groundbreaking.” Timing, logistics, and politics posed challenges to the man asked to recreate an event, now three years in the past, to which he had not been an eyewitness. Photographers surely were on hand in 1940. A few pictures from the ceremony illustrated front-page news stories that appeared the next day. They corroborate the fact that Thompkins appeared in formal attire, while others wore business suits, for example. But there cannot have been a snapshot of the grouping that appears in Scott’s canvass; Walton and Roosevelt both were there, but never at the same time. Walton, one of the ﬁrst speakers, collapsed from heatstroke, was whisked away to a nearby emergency room before Roosevelt arrived, and was unable to return to the ceremony. Moreover, on a day so hot that Walton, a ﬁve-year veteran of the Liberian tropics, suctributes to African Americans who have shaped the course of national history. “The Groundbreaking” is included in the tour. The reproduction I am including in these pages is from a digital photograph sent to me by Todd. Some of the information presented in this discussion of Scott’s painting also came from Todd’s ofﬁce, and I am extremely grateful for his generous assistance. 10. “Ground Broken for Hall of Records,” Washington Post, September 27, 1940, 1, col. 2.

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cumbed to the heat, two of the three women surely would not have brought along fur wraps. The composition of the painting most likely was cobbled together from extant photographs of the event and from individual portraits like the one of Walton sent to the artist by the New York Age.11 One can imagine a celebrated muralist like Scott overcoming these sorts of challenges. He had been making a living as a painter for more than three decades. During the 1930s, he had won numerous commissions for public murals, including one for a mural that appears on the ﬁrst ﬂoor of the Recorder of Deeds Building. Scott’s depiction of Frederick Douglass petitioning Abraham Lincoln to enlist Negro soldiers during the Civil War is one of seven large murals created to represent “historical scenes of the Negro in American life,” according to the announcement made by the National Art Commission in 1941.12 A year earlier, Scott had executed twenty-four large murals for the American Negro Exposition held in Chicago to celebrate the seventy-ﬁfth anniversary of emancipation from slavery.13 Scott was a stranger to neither the representation of race nor the genre of public art. The politics of “The Groundbreaking,” however, were daunting. Just deciding whom to include was no easy task, and it may not have been left to the artist’s discretion. Roosevelt and Thompkins had to appear, as did the military ofﬁcers. Representatives Jennings Randolph, Ambrose J. Kennedy, and Jack Nichols—all Democrats—Lawrence Wood Robert Jr., a leader of the Democratic National Committee, and Rossa F. Downing of the District Bar Association all had spoken at the ceremony and were allies of the president, as was the U.S. minister to Liberia. None of the ﬁrsthand journalistic accounts of the groundbreaking that I have found mention Harry Truman or Everett Dirksen, but they appear, one person removed in either direction from Walton. Similarly, no women were mentioned by name in the news articles, but three women occupy prominent positions in the ﬁrst row. Not all participants in the actual ceremony, however, found places in the painting. The decision to exclude seems to have been made on the

11. Ibid.; “Envoy to Liberia Collapses,” Chicago Defender, October 5, 1940, 1, 2; Charles Hurd, “President Starts Recorder Building,” New York Times, September 27, 1940, 27; “Pres. Breaks Ground for Recorder of Deeds Bldg.,” New York Age, October 5, 1940, 1, col. 7. FDR sent a note addressed to “My dear Mr. Walton” the next day, at the bottom of which he added a short, handwritten note: “I hope you are feeling all right again. FDR,” FDR to Walton, September 27, 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Papers, hereinafter FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Lester A. Walton, 1936–1942. 12. “Seek Artists to Do Murals in Government Building,” Chicago Defender, November 22, 1941, 12. 13. “Editors Plan Exhibit for Exposition,” Chicago Defender, May 11, 1940, 9.

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grounds of both race and politics. The Howard University Glee Club provided entertainment early in the program, but no trace of the African American singers can be found in the painting. Similarly, a parade by the Colored Elks ended at the ceremony, and Grand Exalted Ruler J. Finley Wilson was speaking when the president arrived. They, too, are absent. Wilson, an ardent Republican, however, was problematic from the moment Thompkins asked his old friend to take part in the groundbreaking. A week before the event took place, planners had scrambled to ﬁnd “a good Democrat” to replace Wilson on the program or at the very least someone who would persuade him to “keep within an approved text and to refrain from any untoward behavior.” They explained in a memo to the president’s secretary that they feared the Grand Exalted Ruler would “use the occasion and the President’s presence as an opportunity to say or do something not in keeping.”14 As it turned out, Wilson stole the show. When the president arrived in the midst of Wilson’s comments, Wilson abandoned his prepared speech and took the opportunity to assure Roosevelt of African Americans’ fervent support. According to the Washington Post’s account, Wilson “closed with a rapid-ﬁre declaration of the patriotism of colored people, assuring the President that they would be loyally behind him in any crisis. ‘And if Hitler should attempt anything against the country,’ shouted Wilson, ‘he may get to the District line, but that is where he’ll stop.’”15 Given Wilson’s political afﬁliation and the worry he had caused those who planned the event, it is not terribly surprising that he is left out of the canvass. But other evidence suggests that race might also have played a role in Wilson’s exclusion—as well as in hiding Elmes and Michaux in the shadows and making Walton appear to be white. Among FDR’s papers one can read another urgent memo to the president’s secretary, this one written in 1943, about six months after Scott was commissioned to paint “The Groundbreaking.” The memo begins: “Does the President have any objection to appearing in the picture with the colored people?” The Fine

14. Memorandum for General Watson, September 19, 1940, FDRPA, OF 51c, box 8, folder Recorder of Deeds, 1930–1941. 15. “Ground Broken for Hall of Records,” 3, col. 1. In his special report to the New York Times, Charles Hurd offers a slightly different version of Wilson’s speech. He wrote: “Mr. Wilson recited a roll of Negro patriots, headed by Crispus Attucks, ﬁrst man killed in the Revolution, and ‘Black Sam,’ who distinguished himself at Brandywine, and then said to the President: ‘We want him to know that every black man of America is standing by him in defense of democracy. He need not fear that there are any Nazis or Communists among us. If Hitler comes over here, we will stop him when he gets to the district line’” (Hurd, “President Starts Recorder Building,” 27).

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Arts Commission, whose responsibility it was to judge the artistic merits of the painting, was “in a furore [sic] as to how the President, himself, feels about being in the picture with the colored people.”16 The ofﬁcial record of the Fine Arts Commission’s discussion of the painting ends before the painting was completed, the members expressing misgivings about the sketchiness of Scott’s planned work, and the completion date of 1944 falls one year past the cut-off date for public art records housed at the National Archives.17 Apparently, FDR did not object to sharing the canvass “with the colored people,” but without the archival record, it’s also hard to determine what concessions, if any, Scott may have been asked to make in order to get the approval of the Fine Arts Commission. I have yet to ﬁnd a single article in the press announcing the completion and installation of this work, which differs signiﬁcantly from the hoopla surrounding the seven murals that hang elsewhere in the Recorder of Deeds Building. Scott biographer William E. Taylor notes that “Frederick Douglass Appealing to President Lincoln,” Scott’s mural in the Recorder of Deeds Building, was the only one of the seven executed by an African American, but he writes nothing about “The Groundbreaking.”18 Even Walton’s papers are uncharacteristically silent about a work of art that ensured him a place in the visual record of African American public service. In the end, Scott may have had the last word. The painting, which at ﬁrst glance preserves the prevailing sentiment against social mixing of the races, betrays a puckish attitude toward both race and politics. Both Walton and

16. Dorothy Dowd to Miss Thompson, November 13, 1943, FDRPA, OF 51c, box 8, folder Recorder of Deeds, 1942–1943. 17. Searching through online ﬁnding aids for the National Archives and Records Administration, I located in Record Group 121 a collection entitled “Completed Murals and Sculptures in United States Post Ofﬁces and other Federal Buildings, 1935–1943.” I telephoned an archivist in the Special Media Archives Services Division in College Park, where this collection is housed, just to see if any records for “The Groundbreaking” exist as part of that record group. After checking, the archivist conﬁrmed that nothing pertaining to “The Groundbreaking” appears in any of the records. I then contacted the Fine Arts Commission directly to see if they had any archival records. Susan Cohen had examined the minutes of the commission’s meetings, and she reported that the record ended rather abruptly with commissioners expressing concern about the incomplete nature of Scott’s plan for “The Groundbreaking,” which had come before the group for approval. Minutes do not reﬂect any further discussion at a later meeting. When I told Cohen about the memorandum I had read in the FDR Papers suggesting concern about the race issue, she indicated that no such concern was even hinted at in the minutes. 18. William E. Taylor, “William Edouard Scott: Indianapolis Painter,” in Wilma L. Gibbs, ed., Indiana’s African-American Heritage, 195.

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Thompkins appear as light-skinned as the president himself and lighter than some of the other “white” dignitaries in the ﬁeld. The prominent “V” formed by two rays of light overlays and illuminates multiple double-V’s created by the latticework separating the reviewing stand from the assembled masses, thereby inscribing into the painting the dual aims of African Americans during World War II. Indeed, Scott’s signature appears directly above one such double-V in the darkened right-hand corner. Finally, the tension inherent in the composition makes this a difﬁcult painting to view. One searches in vain for a focal point, eyes roving restlessly around the canvass to ﬁnd its compositional unity. Yet it was perhaps as powerful as any of his other works of public art in that it forces viewers to confront the artiﬁciality of race as a construct, the disuniting effects of race thinking, and the urgency of the Double-V Campaign as the proper foundation for American democracy. Taken altogether, the public and private photographs and Scott’s “The Groundbreaking” helped me see Walton as a racially elusive ﬁgure. His racial identity was variable and capable of being manipulated. This collection of images suggests that its importance to him weighed little more than his class, his attention to good grooming and tastefully chosen clothing, and his sense of humor. Physical appearance as an accurate gauge of race is, in Walton’s case, unreliable. But his lifelong encounter with race thinking and his experience for most of the ﬁrst six decades of the twentieth century left their indelible marks on him. Innocent indifference to the codes of Jim Crow, once lost, can never be regained. All that’s left is haunting. Haunting may seem like an overly dramatic and contrived response to Walton’s lack of racial ﬁxity. It’s possible, after all, to ﬁnd plausible explanations for Walton’s being elided from the historical record, and there’s lots of evidence of Walton’s unwillingness to be hung up by the painful slights and insults that went with being African-descended in the twentieth-century United States. But it’s the relative silence about race that prompts the need for a deeper probing, because silence, in this case, does not mean absence. To tell Walton’s story fully requires revisiting a moment when one drop of Negro blood meant second-class citizenship, economic, social, and political discrimination, and the ever-present threat of violence—it may mean examining our present-day assumptions about race and citizenship with great care for traces of that past we claim to abhor but have inadvertently reproduced. It’s also troubling that Walton could not tell his own story. Of the mass of documents, letters, scrapbooks, receipts, speeches, and press releases that ﬁll the bulging ﬁles where Walton’s papers are preserved, none speak forthrightly about his ancestry, his various careers, or his most uncomfortable experiences as a man of color in the

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United States. But a number of veiled references remain, tucked away in terse letters and published essays that seem to trade in generalities but actually refer to very speciﬁc traumatic events. Because he aspired to be a race leader, who would work within the system to chip away at the obstacles barring people of color from the full privileges of citizenship, Walton couldn’t afford to dwell on the negative present or the horriﬁc past. But neither could he suppress the reality or memory of injustice.

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Chapter 5 A Passing Comment

Walton’s status as a race man actually hides the much more interesting and problematic issue of how he became one. For in donning the mantle of color, Walton subsumed many other aspects of his identity into an identity based on race. He had to choose on which side of the color line he would live and work, even as he attempted to erase that line as a barrier to opportunity and reward. In other words, before Walton became a race man, what was he? When I knew Walton primarily from his writings in the Age and the tiny photograph that adorned his columns on Music and the Stage, I had no doubt about his “race.” In fact, Walton seemed to defy the color line, having worked as a journalist on St. Louis dailies at the turn of the century. In the years before his drama criticism marked Walton as a race man, he explored opportunities available to him because of his intelligence, writing skills, and light skin. For a long time, I resisted the idea that Walton passed for white, because he had devoted his life to the struggle for equality, and he had taken special pride in his campaign to get members of the Associated Press to capitalize Negro. At the Age, Walton always used the ﬁrst-person plural possessive when he wrote about black communities—our homes, our schools, and our performers—and he expressed regret that white people did not visit African American neighborhoods before passing judgment on the nature of African American life. I wanted to disagree with Gerald Early, who wrote of Walton that since it was so “terribly unusual for a white daily 108

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in a major city to use a black reporter in a capacity other than a stringer,” surely he kept his racial identity a secret.1 Then I read the St. Louis Star. Walton, of course, never admitted to passing. Unlike Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, he never wrote about the moment he realized that he was a Negro, nor did he imagine in ﬁction what it meant to pretend to be white.2 To be honest, I’m still not sure that Walton passed for white; I have found no document where he owned up to a double life. He came close to an admission a couple of times while writing for the Age. The ﬁrst time was in an essay on the Negro Players, founded in 1913. As a preemptive strike against critics who might object to the name of this group, Walton defended the reference to the Negro. Our lack of ideality regarding ourselves as a rule is one of our besetting sins. And yet we expect others to respect us as Negroes when many of us do not respect ourselves. The white man’s idea of a Negro seems to be an uncouth, uncultured, ignorant submissive person, who believes in race inferiority on account of color. We should emancipate him of the erroneous impression. Many of us who are of light complexion imagine they can “pass” as an Indian, Filipino or associate themselves with other races much inferior to the African Negro make a pathetic attempt to do so. And yet they expect the Negro to be respected.3

The second time was in an obituary for an African American performer, Charlie Case, who passed in order to get more work. Walton wrote: Coming to New York and ﬁnding the numerous handicaps which the ambitious must face, and soon learning that the path trod by the colored performer is far more rocky than that of the white performer, many have buried their true racial identity and secured work as Caucasians. “Passing for white,” is a game played by hundreds of colored Americans to-day, not as a diversion but as a necessity. No one can blame these people for lessening the obstacles confronting them in this great struggle for existence. Negroes have a feeling of aversion for but one class of colored Americans who “pass for white”: Those who want to be white and don’t know you to-day, but who want to be colored and enjoy your society to-morrow.4

1. Early, ed., “Ain’t But a Place”, 280. 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, 10–12. 3. “The Negro Players,” New York Age. May 15, 1913, 6, col. 2. Emphasis added. 4. “Charlie Case,” New York Age, November 30, 1916, 6, col. 1–2. Emphasis added.

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Given his maternal ancestors, Walton was in fact very light-skinned, but that fact alone—and even these passing comments—prove nothing. In short, there are no “smoking guns,” as historians like to call documents that provide incontrovertible evidence for an argument, that indicate Walton passed. Even if Walton did pass, it’s not clear that he passed as white. The photographic evidence suggests only that his features reﬂected a mixed ancestry. Other passages in Walton’s writings and life pinpoint moments of great disturbance for him. They are little more than textual ruptures that beg investigation into the unspoken backstory. Identifying the underlying sources of the disquietude leads to the stories I want to tell. I believe they’re worth telling, because they reveal treacheries that stymied Walton’s aim of creating the multiracial world he wanted to inhabit. He could not speak of them directly for fear of undermining his own position in the struggle for racial justice. Walton’s racially ambiguous identity disturbed not only whites, determined to police the color line, but also many African Americans, suspicious of the motives of one who could so easily cross it. As each of the following stories suggests, race requires performance and demanded of Walton a careful balancing act. If Walton did pass, then striking the pose of a white journalist purchased space in a daily newspaper in which to articulate the experiences, concerns, and perspectives of African Americans. Such work demanded of Walton a commitment to maintaining good relations on both sides of the color line and speaking in some way to both audiences. But occupying this ambiguous racial space carried dangers—the possibility of discovery, potential backlash from one group or the other, the need for utmost secrecy, and ultimately the lack of control over how he was “represented” to others. Walton’s very racial complexity allowed him to traverse this space and to experience its possibilities as well as its dangers. The dominant culture’s unwillingness to acknowledge the arbitrariness of race meant that in the end Walton alone, not American society, was haunted by his performance of race.

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Chapter 6 The Crisis on the Links

The ﬁrst story takes place in St. Louis, where in 1902 Walton began his career as a journalist on the St. Louis Star. He covered three assignments during his tenure with the Star—the Four Courts, general reporting, and golf coverage. During the week, Walton was one of several Star reporters covering the latest courtroom dramas created by municipal corruption cases that made Circuit Attorney Joseph Folk into a local hero as a champion of democracy. The Star not only reported on the “boodle” cases in nearly every issue in 1902, but also took credit for unearthing key pieces of evidence later used by Folk. One court reporter quoted the foreman of the jury that convicted Julius Lehmann in 1902 as saying, “I was surprised, too, to learn from the ofﬁcials around the Four Courts that so much credit is due the St. Louis Star for its great work in these municipal scandals.”1 Although they were all Star reporters, the editor granted neither Walton nor any of the other reporters a byline, so it is difﬁcult to know what Walton contributed to these reports. It is nevertheless remarkable that a newly hired cub reporter would be assigned to such a high-proﬁle beat. 1. “Lehmann Convicted Himself Says Jury Foreman Oyler,” St. Louis Star, May 21, 1902, 1, col. 2. See also “Sensational Developments Unearthed in the Trial of Boodler Kelly,” St. Louis Star, January 18, 1903, 1, col. 5–6; and “First Birthday of the Star Boodle Crusade,” St. Louis Star, January 22, 1902, 1, col. 4–7. For historical analysis of these cases, see Steven L. Piott, Anti-Monopoly Persuasion: Popular Resistance to the Rise of Big Business in the Midwest.

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That Walton immediately covered the Four Courts does raise questions about the circumstances of his hire. If he presented his high school diploma from Sumner High School, the editor certainly would have known that Walton was African American. Sumner was the ﬁrst high school for African Americans opened west of the Mississippi, and from its inception in 1875, it had produced exclusively black graduates. By 1902, Walton had also obtained a certiﬁcate from a business school, whose exams he passed but whose door he probably never darkened. That credential along with his obvious talent may have persuaded the Star’s editor to give him a chance. An extant photograph of Walton from this period features a ﬁnely groomed, impeccably dressed young man with large, dark, expressive eyes, close-cropped hair, and a straight, prominent nose. In the presence of either black or white men he would not have looked out of place. In the Star ofﬁce, Walton was in the presence of only white men. Regardless of his racial identiﬁcation, Walton wrote articles that stand out from the dozens of news stories that ﬁlled each issue of the Star. Although denied a byline, Walton left his mark in the writing style, the layout, and the personal angle of the stories he submitted. As I read the Star, I sought Walton’s presence by listening for the “spectral voice” with which I had become familiar—a kind of research that challenges the typical practices of a biographer/historian. I listened as I read, and his voice, not his name, led me to his work. Walton’s words whispered in stories cobbled together from reports by a team of reporters and rang out clearly when he was the sole author. In both cases, Walton’s deft pen and media savvy allowed him to insinuate a voice for African Americans into a newspaper that imagined a white readership, but not surprisingly, the articles lacked all ﬁrst-person plural possessive pronouns. In early 1902, the sensational murder of A. Dean Cooper at Vista Bath House made front-page news; the chief suspect was an African American attendant at the establishment, William Strother. Within days, Strother was accused of the murder. The Star, like other St. Louis dailies, assumed that Strother was guilty and that it was only a matter of time before the police would extract a confession from him. The front-page story reported the essentials of the case against him: Cooper was wealthy, and Strother had opportunity. As the account continued on page two, however, a backstory emerged that cut across the grain of the narrative. Strother was a young man who lived modestly with his mother and had an unblemished reputation as a trustworthy attendant at the bathhouse. These details came together to form a nucleus of doubt about his guilt. Furthermore, this personal information, which failed to appear in other newspapers’ accounts of the case, came from an interview with Strother himself. It was one of the

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few instances in this tragic episode where Strother’s humanity and voice broke through. Strother offered another explanation for Cooper’s murder, one that built upon his insider knowledge of Cooper’s many sexual liaisons at the bathhouse—“disgusting orgies”—to which Strother had been ordered to turn a blind eye. This textual rupture complicated what seemed to be a straightforward case of murderous black criminality. It was sandwiched between long passages and a ﬁnal paragraph that assumed the attendant’s guilt.2 When the case ﬁnally came to trial about three months later, it was no longer frontpage news, but headlines related the expected verdict—“Strother Is on Trial for Life” and “Strother Talks for His Life.” In these stories, Walton’s voice is heard ﬁrst: “Strother was brought into the court room shortly before 10 o’clock as neat and well-dressed as on the day that he made his confession to Chief Desmond. His hair was neatly combed and his mustache twisted in a way to show that he had spent considerable time on it. From the start it was evident that the negro murderer intended to make as favorable a showing before the jury as he could, probably realizing it was his only hope.”3 Three days later, Walton reported on Strother’s “dramatic” testimony that exposed the police ofﬁcers’ pressure to “sweat” a confession out of him: He said that for three days Chief Desmond, Capt. Gaffney and minor police ofﬁcers [plied] him with questions, frequently telling him to “quit lying” and to tell the truth, and that they would help him out of the trouble. Strother declared that he was pushed and shoved around by policemen and detectives and the same questions asked him over and over. He said that he insisted that he was innocent, but that the police would not have it any other way but that he had killed Cooper, and that the confession was forced from him by the persistency of police ofﬁcers.4

Walton depicts Strother in terms that run counter to prevailing stereotypes associated with African Americans—his careful grooming, neat attire, and victimization at the hands of the police. Where the Post-Dispatch had lionized Chief Desmond for getting a confession out of the black attendant, Wal-

2. “Negro Says He Was Absent When Cooper Was Killed,” St. Louis Star, January 23, 1902, 1, col. 5–6; 2, col. 4–5. Contrast the Star account with “Strother Confesses to Desmond that He Took Cooper’s Diamonds,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 24, 1902, 1, col. 5–7; and “St. Louis Police Department Achieves a Signal Triumph in Confession of Cooper’s Slayer,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 26, 1902, 2, col. 1–4. 3. “Strother Is on Trial for Life,” St. Louis Star, April 16, 1902, 2, col. 7. 4. “Strother Talks for His Life,” St. Louis Star, April 19, 1902, 5, col. 3.

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ton exposed and gave credence to Strother’s account of the tactics used to obtain a false confession.5 The next day, the Star reported that seven jurors had voted for acquittal, having been persuaded by Strother’s testimony, his modest habits, the lack of hard evidence to support the prosecution’s case, and the unsavory stories about Cooper’s debauchery that had surfaced during the trial. The judge dismissed the charges against Strother.6 I’m not suggesting here that Walton’s reports were in any way directly responsible for Strother’s acquittal. But writing with the imprimatur of a white daily, Walton crafted alternative narratives that contributed a new dimension to what could be seen as the formation of “common sense” in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. Certainly his stories planted the seeds of doubt that germinated in ground already fertilized with suspicions about the trustworthiness of public ofﬁcials. In that sense they can be seen as informed by the prevailing “muckraking” ethos that brought instances of injustice to light. The interesting twist is that a reform-oriented newspaper like the Star voiced the assertions of an ordinary African American protesting his innocence. Most of the other pieces Walton published in the Star followed a similar pattern and included elements and a style that he would develop more fully at the Age and New York World. Almost all were built around a photograph of the subject, and each offered a window into the lives of people and groups either not well understood or more often simply overlooked. A story about newsboys trying to create a “union” that would foster ﬁnancial responsibility, mutual aid, and improvement of conditions is exemplary of his work.7 Those articles that focused on African American subjects seem linked by Walton’s determination—articulated explicitly later—to demonstrate the variety of experiences and types of people that made up African American communities. He reported on the formation of the Negro Protective League of St. Louis (NPL) in 1902 in the aftermath of the shooting of an unarmed Negro by a police ofﬁcer and a “mass meeting” several months later, organized by many of the founders of the NPL, to protest a bill pending in the Missouri legislature to establish Jim Crow seating in railroad cars traveling in the state.8 Concerned citizens, who created organizations, elected ofﬁcers, 5. “St. Louis Police Department Achieves a Signal Triumph.” 6. “Strother Jury Fails to Agree,” St. Louis Star, April 20, 1902, 1, col. 2. 7. “Ambitious Newsboys Want to Build Up a Strong Union for Improvement,” St. Louis Star, January 16, 1903, 2, col. 3–5. Like other stories along these lines, it is illustrated with photographs of the boys in their work clothes. 8. “To Hold a Public Meeting,” St. Louis Star, April 17, 1902, 12, col. 3; “Condemned the Garner Killing,” St. Louis Star, April 30, 1902, 2, col. 4; and “Oppose Jim Crow Cars,” St. Louis Star, February 2, 1903, 5, col. 2.

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and planned a course of action, emerge from these articles in contradistinction to the more ubiquitous black criminals who populated other news stories about African Americans in these years. Similarly a series of articles on the meeting of A. M. E. bishops in St. Louis in May 1904 featured photographs of distinguished men, named them—J. W. Alstork, G. W. Clinton, J. W. Hood, and John Dancy—and accorded them the respectful attention that leaders in any ﬁeld might expect.9 Not all African Americans, of course, were race leaders, but Walton wrote with equal respect about black entertainers like Ernest Hogan and his Smart Set Company, who performed in St. Louis in 1903, and a local celebrity, Ben Burch, a prize-winning “rag-tag” dancer. In the article on Hogan, Walton offered both a short history of black performance in the United States and insight into the professional aspirations of the new generation of African American entertainers. “What we need for this is education,” Walton quotes Hogan as saying (with the notable absence of dialect). “The former negro [sic] actor has merely been a ‘moke.’ He and his jokes have both been vulgar. He does not have to resort to vulgarity to gain patronage.”10 In writing about Burch, Walton explained in technical detail how one performed rag-tag dancing, and he took pains to point out that it should not be confused with “rag-time” dancing. The “graceful science” of Burch’s performance implicitly dispelled any notion that his dance moves arose from “natural” or “instinctual” sources. Again, Walton took a lighthearted subject for his theme and wrote about it in ways that belied prevailing stereotypes associated with African Americans.11 9. “Think Roosevelt Right Man in Right Place,” St. Louis Star, May 6, 1904, 3, col. 2– 4; “‘Negro Race Is at Its Crisis,’” St. Louis Star, May 6, 1904, 7, col. 1; “Would Abolish Use of Robes in AME Pulpit,” St. Louis Star, May 12, 1904, 20, col. 4–5; and “‘Every Member of My Race Is for Roosevelt,’” St. Louis Star, May 14, 1904, 5, col. 3–4. Later, Walton would correspond with a John Dancy in Detroit in his capacity as a local leader of the Urban League, which Walton’s father-in-law, Fred R. Moore, helped found. I suspect that the John Dancy referred to here is the same man. 10. “Hogan Sees Future for Negro in the Drama,” St. Louis Star, February 8, 1903, 5, col. 1–2. An advertisement for the show, touting the Smart Set Company as the “Greatest Colored Show on Earth,” can be found in St. Louis Star, February 5, 1903, 7, among other listings for diversions. According to the Dictionary of American Slang, “moke” was a term used at the turn of the twentieth century to mean a Negro, more particularly a “musical Negro” or minstrel. The dictionary does not cite a meaning from the state of Missouri, and there is a noticeable gap between 1896 and 1927, years identiﬁed by informants as the time when they ﬁrst encountered the word. Walton offers no deﬁnition of the term, but in the context of the article, I think it was meant to convey a critique of the typical depiction of African Americans on the minstrel stage. See Frederic G. Cassity and Joan Houston Hall, eds., Dictionary of American Slang, 3: 632. 11. “Ben Burch the Champion Rag-Tag Dancer of St. Louis,” St. Louis Star, January 3, 1903, 2, col. 4–5.

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A crumbling copy of one of Walton’s Star features survives in his clipping ﬁle housed at the Schomburg. It reports on the death of a onehundred-year-old ex-slave, Peter Duncan. His former master, U. S. District Attorney Pat Dyer, told Walton how Duncan, originally the property of John Duncan, came to live at his father’s farm and how their decades-long afﬁliation had deepened into friendship. John Duncan had caught “gold fever” in 1849 and headed off to California in the hope of striking it rich. He took Peter Duncan’s “faithful slave wife” with him, abandoning the man to “his unhappy lot never to lay eyes upon her again.” “The brokenhearted old slave,” Walton continued, “then went on to live on Col. Dyer’s father’s farm. Young as he was, this separation of Peter and his wife made a lasting impression upon the boy [Pat Dyer].” Duncan remained with the Dyers after the Civil War. Walton took great liberty by “quoting” the deceased in black dialect—not with the intention of drawing laughs, but in the hope of asserting a principle. Duncan’s loyalty to Dyer arose, Walton argued, from the colonel’s support of the Union and his belief that “nobody nebber was good enuf to own nobody else.”12 Missouri, in general, and St. Louis, in particular, were deeply divided over slavery, secession, and the Civil War, so a story like this one was bound to evoke strong feelings. Humor was not among them, for the story itself and the use of dialect, which typically signaled black ignorance and unwitting selfdeprecation, highlighted the affection of a prominent white man for a humble former slave and ventriloquized the slave’s/master’s philosophical objection to the ownership of human property. This sample of Walton’s journalism at the Star represents an interesting collection. It amounts to a fraction of what he undoubtedly penned concerning the black community, considering his later lament that city editors typically wanted to limit the quantity and quality of articles devoted to African Americans. His narrative interventions in the Star lack militancy, but they nevertheless cut crosswise of the aims of a newspaper that conceived of its readership in white terms. The human interest angle and the generally Republican Party sentiments expressed in the articles were compatible with the objectives of editors seeking to carve out a niche in a crowded market of daily and weekly newspapers in the city, but contained within them is an inherent respect for African Americans as people and as citizens. Like pinpoints of light, they mark the journalistic landscape as hints of a human presence barely acknowledged yet too intense to ignore.

12. “Notables Follow Old Slave to the Grave,” St. Louis Star, September 12, 1903, 3, col. 3.

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These articles, of course, were not the only ones that bear Walton’s signature traits as a writer. In addition to reporting on the cases heard in the Four Courts and to doing general reporting, Walton was also assigned to cover the golf beat on weekends. Like his other journalistic pieces, his golf reports did not appear under a byline, but there’s no question that he is the author: the sentences that saunter across the page; the attention to details about the country clubs’ grounds, net worth, tournament schedules, and ofﬁcers; the informed critique of individual golf performers, and the aggressive effort to place golf-related stories in the paper—all anticipate Walton’s writing for the Age. Walton’s golf coverage bears the marks of one who understood clearly the imperative of successful journalism at the dawn of the age of mass media—write stories that interest readers, and they will buy your product—and who was intimately familiar with the rules and techniques of the game. This last point raises huge questions. How did Walton learn to play golf, and how did he manage to offer ﬁrsthand reports of the tournaments and soirees sponsored by the white elite of St. Louis? How, in other words, did Walton get a foot in the door of country clubs, which at the turn of the century were newly constructed bastions of white privilege? St. Louis did not open a public golf course until 1912, several years after Walton had left the city, so he could not have picked up the game in that way. The sport itself was just gaining a devoted following in the United States in the 1890s, and as Richard Moss has persuasively argued, golﬁng and country clubs appealed most powerfully to wealthy white Americans, looking to reproduce “village life,” to ﬁnd relief from the rigorous demands of the business world, and to create a separate social space apart from the hoi polloi of rapidly growing American cities.13 The private clubs in St. Louis were highly capitalized and socially exclusive ventures, and while some caddies may have been African American, members were not.14 Caddies sometimes did learn how to play, and in at least one celebrated case from 1896, caddies of color were permitted to compete in a professional tournament, primarily because the amateur titles were at the time most coveted.15 But would a former caddie have been welcomed into the inner sanctum of the clubhouse and granted interviews with local celebrities? Walton’s friend, Herbert Bayard Swope, later played golf with Lord Northcliffe while in Versailles for the peace conference in 1918, and as one who “regarded nonconformity and audacity as standard operating procedures,” Swope may have introduced Walton to the game on links 13. Richard J. Moss, Golf and the American Country Club, chapters 1–3. 14. James Healey, Golﬁng before the Arch: A History of St. Louis Golf, 9–52. 15. Moss, Golf and the American Country Club, 52–53.

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meant for the elite of St. Louis.16 A quick study in any case, Walton grasped the fundamentals and the stakes of the game and then applied his understanding in this new area to do what he did exceptionally well—write articles that impressed upon readers the vitality of the clubs, the drama of the sport, and the importance of the subject. In St. Louis, members of the Glen Echo, Normandie, Country, and St. Louis Athletic Clubs, local golfers, and amateur duffers could turn to the sporting section of the Star to ﬁnd stories about their newly opened or recently improved facilities and matches in which St. Louisans shone. They found informed commentary on a sport that little more than a decade earlier had been widely misunderstood as a contest of speed to see how many holes one could play in a speciﬁed length of time.17 Local club members and golfers saw their names in the newspaper for hosting gala events or winning matches and challenging courses. They got special features on women who had taken up the game and professionals who demonstrated their techniques. Moreover, at a time when caddies were rarely mentioned by name, Walton wrote about the Tiffany Cup Tournament staged for caddies “of all sizes and hues” at the Country Club and identiﬁed the semiﬁnalists as Harry Walker, Casper Wolff, Willie Rautenbusch, and Kenny Street. One of Walton’s most humorous features resulted from his assignment at the Four Courts. One of the golf instructors at the St. Louis Athletic Club wound up in court for having “engaged in a ﬁstic try-out” with one of his neighbors. Walton recognized the defendant, got the story, and related to readers the instructor’s chagrin at being bested by a smaller man as well as the unlikely ending of the two brawlers leaving court together as “friends.”18 16. Kahn, The World of Swope, 7–9. The story comes from a sketch of Swope published by Stanley Walker in The Saturday Evening Post in 1938 and excerpted as part of the publisher’s foreword to Kahn’s volume. The editor, M. Lincoln Schuster, is responsible for the quote characterizing Swope as audacious and nonconformist. Imagining, however, is not demonstrating. I have come across no evidence that Swope taught Walton how to play golf or that the two of them ever golfed together. 17. Moss, Golf and the American Country Club, 44. 18. “Winning Golf Team Returns to St. Louis,” St. Louis Star, March 18, 1902, 8, col. 3; “Golf,” St. Louis Star, June 13, 1902, 6, col. 6; “Golf Tourney on at Field Club,” St. Louis Star, June 22, 1902, Sport Section, 1, col. 3; “America’s Fair Golfers Can Defeat the British,” St. Louis Star, March 15, 1903, Sport Section, 4, col. 6–7; “Golf Instructor Nicholls Is Giving St. Louis Players Their Second Lesson in Game,” St. Louis Star, January 16, 1903, 9, col. 5 (this story is illustrated with two oversized photographs of Nicholls demonstrating his technique and was in the main section of the paper, not on a page devoted to sports); “A Unique Golf Match,” St. Louis Star, August 30, 1903, 1, col. 1; “‘Caddies’ at Play at Country Club,” St. Louis Star, August 22, 1903, 8, col. 4; and “Golf Instructor on Warpath,” St. Louis Star, March 9, 1903, 9, col. 5.

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Then there was the article that didn’t quite ﬁt—the one that points to a painful moment of truth, the one that hints that a specter haunts Walton’s performance of race on the links. The Glen Echo Club opened the 1902 golf season with an all-day event that began with caddies scrambling to retrieve the ﬁrst ball ceremonially driven by Jesse Carlton and ended after midnight with a dance. Although no matches were played, individual golfers did show off their swings. In the late afternoon a sixteen-piece band served up a four-hour concert for club members and their guests. Dinner was served halfway through the concert and lasted until eight-thirty, when speeches were made and members unanimously reelected their president. Dancing followed the business meeting. Walton concludes this detailed, ﬁrsthand account of the festivities: “After the election, the dance in the cool club began. Though it was positively suffocating in the city the Glen Echo Club was cool. A negro quintet furnished the music like at Col. Carvel’s in the Crisis.”19 What was The Crisis doing on St. Louis links? The Crisis was an extremely popular novel set in St. Louis in the years spanning the Civil War and published in 1901 by a native son, Winston Churchill. Although it is now nearly forgotten, the novel, according to William Allen White, “sold in carload lots” when it ﬁrst appeared. As late as 1924, readers of the Literary Digest International Book Review ranked its author fourth on a list of the ten greatest writers appearing after 1900.20 As a native of the city, Churchill enjoyed a local following, but because he set it in St. Louis, The Crisis “most endeared him to successive generations of St. Louisans.”21 As a historical romancer, Churchill weaves historical ﬁgures like U. S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and William T. Sherman into a story of ﬁctional characters facing the prospect of war. Two families symbolize the sectional positions. Colonel Carvel and his ﬁery daughter, Virginia, as slave owners, staunchly defend the peculiar institution. Stephen Brice and his saintly mother, recently arrived in the city from Massachusetts, following family and ﬁnancial disasters, embody a moderate unionist position. Predictably, the two young people, though at odds through much of the novel, fall in love and exemplify national healing through sectional (white) reconciliation at the war’s end. At the very least, mentioning The Crisis 19. “Glen Echo Club Opens Season,” St. Louis Star, May 4, 1902, Sport Section, 1, col. 5. 20. Winston Churchill, The Crisis. The book originally was published in 1901 by the Macmillan Company, but all citations here are from the 1929 reprint edition. The author is not related to the far more famous prime minister of Great Britain. For information about the writer and the popularity of The Crisis, see Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, 282. 21. Literary St. Louis: Noted Authors and St. Louis Landmarks Associated with Them, 7.

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showed off Walton’s cultivation and wide reading and allowed him to tap into the warm feelings evoked by the novel. In his report on the season opening of the Glen Echo Club, Walton compared the “negro quintet” to musicians who entertained Colonel Carvel’s guests in The Crisis. His simile evokes pre–Civil War southern gaiety made possible by slave labor, for the only party hosted by the Carvels occurred before the city erupted in open conﬂict and before the Colonel lost most of his property. While it is likely that the ﬁctional musicians were African Americans, Churchill does not explicitly identify their race. More likely, the comparison centered on the liveliness of the music and its power to spark romance. At the Carvels’ party, Stephen Brice sweeps a reluctant Virginia Carvel into his arms to dance to the opening strains of a Jenny Lind Waltz, and “faster and faster they stepped each forgetful of self and place.”22 So, maybe the Glen Echo hall was “cool” but the music was “hot,” just like it had been in The Crisis. And certainly a “negro quintet” in St. Louis in 1902 would have had no trouble striking up syncopated tunes for the delight of dancing couples at the club. At the same time, however, there’s more to The Crisis—and to Walton’s reference to it—than interest in white romance. The most riveting scene in the novel takes place at a slave auction held on the courthouse steps. Stephen Brice happens upon the scene and is sickened by the horror of men “bidding, yes, for the possession of souls.” “The misery in front of him held Stephen in a spell,” Churchill writes. “Figures stood out from the group. A white-haired patriarch with eyes raised to the sky; a ﬂat-breasted woman whose child was gone, whose weakness made her valueless. Then two girls were pushed forth, one a quadroon of great beauty, to be ﬁngered. Stephen turned his face away.”23 Although no abolitionist, Brice is moved by the human tragedy being played out before him. It is clear that the “quadroon of great beauty” would be used as a prostitute in New Orleans—Brice overhears her mother, Nancy, wail to an abolitionist friend, “Mistah Cantah, save her, suh f’om dat wicked life o’ sin.”24 The abolitionist lacks the means to help the distraught woman, and Brice decides to bid for the woman himself. He ﬁnds himself bidding against Virginia Carvel’s husband-to-be, who wants to give the slave to Virginia as a gift. With a bid of nine hundred ten dollars, Brice purchases Hester in order to grant her her freedom.25

22. Churchill, The Crisis, 114. 23. Ibid., 36. 24. Ibid., 38. 25. Ibid., 44.

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In a novel more about ﬁnding common ground for national unity than about attacking slavery, this dramatic moment stands out. It contrasts sharply with the benign picture of slavery embodied by the loyal and affectionate slaves owned by the Carvel family. In 1910, the scene prompted Alexander Buchanan, a Union veteran, to recount for a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter his version of an 1859 auction. Buchanan remembered “the same sense of profound horror,” “the awful tragic-drama which attended the dispersal of all those men, women and children”—it was, he insisted, just as Churchill described it.26 The scene indicts slavery as insistently as the novel as a whole seeks to restore amity between the North and South. Citing The Crisis allowed Walton to speak simultaneously to two audiences—two audiences crucial to his successful performance of race. The principal readers of this column undoubtedly were the wealthy white Glen Echo Club members who had staged and participated in the gala event. Not only were they compared favorably to an earlier generation of social leaders depicted in an extremely popular novel, but also implicitly their activity resembled that of the simpler bygone days of sociability—a “village” ethos now compromised by dramatic urban growth and social change.27 The club may have engaged a “negro quintet,” but the presence of the musicians did not disturb traditional race relations. The reference to Churchill’s novel in a sense put the black musicians in their place—the only musicians in The Crisis provide a backdrop for white courtship, which leads to marriage, sectional reconciliation, and the reproduction of AngloSaxon dominance; and the only Negroes in the novel are slaves, objects of pity or ﬁercely loyal to their master and mistress. It also implicitly allied the author with the club members. Bringing a novel like The Crisis into a golf report was really unnecessary unless it could serve some other purpose. Here it offers reassurance to St. Louis’s white elite that the man making headlines of their leisure was one of them. At the same time a smaller secondary audience may have looked for the article—the members of the “negro quintet” who provided the music. St. Louis was home to a thriving African American musical community. Indeed, some of the best composers and performers of ragtime lived and worked in the city—Tom Turpin, Sam Patterson, Joe Jordan, Louis Chauvin, and Scott Joplin, just to name the most prominent of them—and Walton 26. “Soldier Tells of Life Scenes in ‘The Crisis’ on Return of the Vicksburg Anniversary,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 3, 1910, 10, in Mrs. John Green Scrapbook, #1, 19, 59, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. 27. Moss, Golf and the American Country Club, 25–26.

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counted many black musicians among his friends. The darker side of The Crisis and its critique of slavery allowed Walton to maintain solidarity with African Americans who understood all too well that their labor and subordination propped up the privileged world of Glen Echo. The alignment of the white elite with a discredited slaveowning regime, achieved by an African American reporter performing whiteness was both subversive and amusing—a move not unlike that made in antebellum America by slaves who communicated subversive and amusing messages in songs that delighted white listeners.28 Walton’s presence in one of the city’s most exclusive clubs and his clever report with its sly reference to The Crisis struck all the more sharply at a time when interracial tensions in the city were mounting. In the 1880s and 1890s, African Americans in the professions or with the necessary ﬁnancial means left crowded downtown St. Louis for neighborhoods like Elleardsville, which, up that time, had been almost exclusively white residential developments. No race riots erupted, as they did elsewhere, but discontent simmered beneath the surface calm. A few years after Churchill’s novel appeared, the 26th Ward Improvement Association formed with the express purpose of driving African Americans out of the area. While Joseph Folk placed St. Louis in the vanguard of progressive reform, fellow citizens took advantage of the initiative and referendum to petition successfully for mandatory segregation of the races.29 As the color line hardened, Walton managed to straddle it. Walton maintained his double identity for about two years, but given the racial climate and the stiffening resolve of white St. Louis to police the color line more vigorously, the task couldn’t have been easy. Through the remainder of 1902 and all of 1903, he continued his enthusiastic coverage of golﬁng events. When the Normandie Club Park opened a new facility, he predicted that it would be “one of the nattiest of St. Louis’s many country clubs,” and when Normandie golfers played against members of the Glen Echo Club, Walton called it “Golf That Was Truly Exciting.”30 He took golfers seriously; he praised their victories and the clubs’ grounds; and he

28. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made; and John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. 29. Lawrence O. Christensen, “Black St. Louis,” 138, 147; Schoenberg and Bailey, “The Symbolic Meaning of an Elite Black Community,” 94, 97; Smith, Selected Neighbors and Neighborhoods of North St. Louis, 28; and Wright, The Ville, St. Louis. On mandatory racial segregation, see Kelleher, “St. Louis’ 1916 Residential Segregation Ordinance,” 239–48. 30. “Golf,” St. Louis Star, June 13, 1902, 6, col. 6; “Golf That Was Truly Exciting,” St. Louis Star, June 7, 1902, Sport Section, 1, col. 4.

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gave readers of the Star a glimpse into their private domain in ways that allowed the denizens of these exclusive preserves to bask in the glow of their own worthiness. What they didn’t realize—and here the absence of a byline worked to his advantage—was that Walton also made space for the perspectives, achievements, and aspirations of African Americans. Meanwhile, Walton cultivated race leaders and pursued opportunities in the black community that, again, because of segregation, went largely undetected by the white world in which he held his day job. Shortly after writing the article on Ernest Hogan, for example, Walton signed a contract to write lyrics for four songs composed by Hogan, and the “Unbleached American” incorporated them into Rufus Rastus a few years later. He also wrote essays that appeared in the Colored American Magazine in 1902 and 1903—one on Moses Dickson, “The Great Negro Organizer and Fraternal Society Leader,” and one on “The Future of the Negro on Stage.”31 But in 1904, Walton’s two worlds would collide.

31. The contract was with Joseph W. Stern and Company, dated September 17, 1903, for four songs: “Time Will Tell,” “There’s No One Can Love Like a Coon,” “I Think They Want Me Too,” and “Just around the Corner.” The contract speciﬁed a royalty rate of four cents per copy to be shared jointly by the composer and lyricist. It can be found in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 6/1. Lester A. Walton, “Moses Dickson: The Great Negro Organizer and Fraternal Society Leader,” 354–56; Lester A. Walton, “The Future of the Negro on the Stage,” 439–42. Gerald Early included the essay on Dickson in a recent anthology, indicating that it appeared in the St. Louis Star in April 1902. I was unable to locate the essay anywhere in the Star. See Early, “Ain’t but a Place,” 280, 282.

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Chapter 7 Something Doin’

In 1904, St. Louis hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition to celebrate a century of achievement since the acquisition of territory that had doubled the size of the infant republic. “The world had never witnessed so marvelous a phantasm,” Henry Adams insisted in his 1907 autobiography, by night Arabia’s crimson sands had never returned a glow half so astonishing, as one wandered among long lines of white palaces, exquisitely lighted by thousands on thousands of electric candles, soft, rich, shadowy, palpable in their sensuous depths, all in deep silence, profound solitude, listening for a voice or a footfall or the plash of an oar, as though the Emir Mirza were displaying the beauties of this City of Brass, which could show nothing half so beautiful as this illumination, with its vast, white, monumental solitude, bathed in the pure light of setting suns.1

A tribute to modern technology, the exposition was ﬂooded with power when President Roosevelt, in Washington, D. C., pressed a telegraph key to signal its start; a testament to empire, the fair reproduced villages of Negritos, Igorots, Moros, and Bagobos to display the “little brown brothers” (and sisters) under the protection of the United States since the victory against Spain in the Philippines. Forty-three nations and forty-ﬁve U.S. 1. Excerpt from The Education of Henry Adams in Lee Ann Sandweiss, ed., Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City, 1670–2000, 443.

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states and territories erected buildings to show off their technological achievements and to showcase their traditions. In keeping with the forward thinking of the fair, St. Louis scraped ﬂat the Native American mounds in Forest Park to make way for the grand spectacle.2 For Lester Walton, the fair promised great opportunity. In September 1903, he announced jubilantly, “As has been prophesied by The Star all summer long St. Louis gets the Nat’l Amateur Golf Championship Tournament World’s Fair year.”3 The following March, before the Louisiana Purchase Exposition opened, Walton put together a feature on “Negro Day,” planned for August 1 and featuring not only an address by Booker T. Washington, but also an ode by Paul Laurence Dunbar, written in honor of the occasion.4 Years later Walton would also confess that he was asked by the city editor to interview a famous bandmaster. Perhaps it was the great John Philip Sousa, who had been making annual visits to the city since the late 1880s and would bring his music to the fair.5 By 1904, Walton was a seasoned reporter. His name appeared in boldface in the St. Louis city directory that year, as did the names of other newspapermen. Covering high-proﬁle events like these held out the promise of even better assignments in the years to come. As a researcher, I have to admit feeling excited at the prospect of reading Walton’s work in 1904. I had developed considerable admiration for what he had accomplished as a reporter. Reading his “reviews” of various golﬁng matches had deepened my appreciation of the theater and concert reviews he later prepared for the Age. Whether on the links or on the stage, performance, as Walton wrote about it, reﬂected not mere talent—it represented character on display, and it made both sport and acting more than simple diversions. Moreover, having read hundreds of issues of Missouri newspapers from the turn of the century, I was amazed by Walton’s success in publishing positive accounts of African American life. At the point when I started reading the 1904 issues of the Star, I knew, in one sense, what came next—that 2. James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980, 327–95; and George Lipsitz, The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City, 29. For additional insightful and critical readings of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, see Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916, 154–83; Paul Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901–1905,” 74–115; and Sharra Vostral, “Imperialism on Display: The Philippine Exposition at the 1904 World’s Fair,” 18–31. 3. “St. Louis Gets National Amateur Golf Championship,” St. Louis Star, September 5, 1903, 8, col. 5–6. 4. “Poet Dunbar Expected to Write Negro Day Fair Ode,” St. Louis Star, March 15, 1904, 12, col. 4–5. In typical Walton fashion, a photograph of the African American poet took up the column adjacent to the text. 5. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 372.

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Walton would eventually seek greener pastures in New York, that his time in St. Louis was about over. In another sense, however, I was not at all prepared for the events that linked these two periods in Walton’s life. The trouble seems to have started some time in late spring. On April 30, 1904, David R. Francis, president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, opened the fair, proclaiming, “Enter herein ye sons of men!” In the following weeks, it became less clear that all “sons of men” were welcome. Even before the fair opened, Booker T. Washington replied with considerable hesitation to an invitation from Walter Farmer to speak at Negro Day. “I think I ought to say to you conﬁdentially and privately,” he wrote Farmer on April 22, “that the impression is fast spreading through the country among the colored people that they are to receive nothing in the way of accommodations in restaurants, etc. on the Exposition grounds, and this report is causing a rather bitter feeling among the race.”6 An article published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in early June and picked up by other major urban dailies emphasized the general fairness that prevailed at the fair but did point to “a few cases of discrimination on account of race.”7 Shortly after this article appeared, “prominent colored citizens” in St. Louis met to discuss the situation at the monthly meeting of the Forum Club, and they decided “unanimously” to “boost the World’s Fair and make known to the colored people throughout the United States” that the exposition was “free from prejudice” and did not “discriminate on account of race or color.” Still looking forward to Negro Day, the Forum Club announced that Washington, Du Bois, and members of the Tenth Cavalry would take part in the planned festivities.8 About the time the Forum Club met and endorsed the fair, Emmett J. Scott arrived in St. Louis to see for himself what conditions were like and to prepare an article for the Voice of the Negro. He opened his article with a glowing description of the monumental buildings, the exhibits, and the “Pike.” “The Grand Basin, the marvelous Cascades; the concerts, the fountains, the foreign exhibits—great in magnitude and interest; the night illuminations, the crowds, all is magniﬁcent; all is worth seeing.” But despite the wonder the exposition inspired in Scott, he concluded his report, “Color-prejudice has wide sway on the Exposition grounds. Story after

6. Washington to Farmer, April 22, 1902, Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company Collection, series 4, subseries 1, folder 14, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. 7. A clipping of the article appears in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company Collection. 8. “Negroes Indorse World’s Fair,” St. Louis Star, June 13, 1904, 5, col. 1. The prose style suggests that Walton is the author of this article.

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story of denial of the simplest courtesies has been told me.” Visitors to the fair, he insisted, would ﬁnd nothing representative of the African American contribution to American progress, and African American visitors could expect to be denied access to water, food, hotel rooms, and fair treatment. Scott compared “A Southern Plantation,” a concession on the Pike that exhibited Negro life in the South before the Civil War, to the Dahomey Village in Chicago’s fair of 1893. Each was the sole representation of the Negro at the respective fairs, and both demeaned Negroes.9 W. S. Scarborough’s report on the fair, which appeared in the same issue of the Voice of the Negro, offered an even more scorching critique. He wrote: That a people—a part and parcel of the great Commonwealth—a people who helped to cut the forests, make the timber, build the cities, till the soil, and who with sweat of brow endured pain and hardship for their country’s sake, should now be ignored and treated with disdain when it comes to the enjoyment of the fruits of these labors, is indeed a sad commentary upon the much vaunted American sense of justice, American civilization and American Christianity. . . . The development of the southern portion of this Purchase is largely due to [the Negro’s] presence and labor. He is so closely identiﬁed with it that he is an integral part of it, yet as a man or woman a place in it is denied.10

Like Scott, Scarborough discouraged African American readers of the Voice of the Negro from attending the fair. By the time these articles appeared, Negro Day had been cancelled, and various black organizations had moved their meetings to venues outside of St. Louis.11 For Walton the cancellation meant that he would not get the chance to cover Washington’s or Du Bois’s addresses or to showcase the art of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Without the Tenth Cavalry he could not write about the valor of African American citizens and soldiers. The Star, like the organizers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, maintained a stony silence about the role people of color had played in developing Thomas Jefferson’s “empire for liberty.” That, of course, is not to say that race-related matters did not get attention. As Robert Rydell has argued, “[T]he directors of the Saint Louis fair turned this portrait of the world into an anthropologically

9. Emmett J. Scott, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 305–11. 10. William S. Scarborough, “The Negro and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 314. 11. Walter Farmer to Booker T. Washington, July 28, 1904, Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company Collection, series 4, subseries 1, folder 14, Missouri Historical Society. “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 342.

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validated racial landscape that made the acquisition of the Philippine Islands and continued overseas expansion seem as much a part of the manifest destiny of the nation as the Louisiana Purchase itself.”12 While one objective of anthropologists was to plant the idea that “savage” people are capable of making progress toward civilization, the presence of so many primitive and scantily clad people of color did just as much to reinforce widely held notions about racial hierarchy that directly affected troubled race relations in the United States and elsewhere. All through the summer of 1904, as I experienced it secondhand in front of a microﬁlm reader at the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia, I knew that something was amiss. Walton was silent. I looked in vain for his interview with the famous bandmaster and his glowing reports of the national amateur golf championship. A welter of voices rose from the page, but none of them was Walton’s. I read more slowly, deliberately, noticing little cartoon Sambo ﬁgures announcing the weather forecast and special events at the fairgrounds. Walton surely would have abhorred that development. The summer wore on, and with the approach of election day, Walton made a few brief appearances. When the 1905 golf reporting began with no sign of him, I was certain that Walton had left the Star. Indeed, the St. Louis city directory, which came out each June, listed Walton in 1905 as a “reporter,” but it no longer identiﬁed an afﬁliation with the Star, and his name no longer appeared in boldface type. In the 1906 directory, he’s identiﬁed as a “salesman” and in 1907’s as a “stenographer.”13 The events of 1904 are shrouded in mystery. They constitute yet another reason that Walton’s life story deﬁes easy, traditional narration. The absence of evidence stymies conventional analysis yet begs for some kind of reading of the traces of Walton that bracket those silent summer months. An article by him published in the Star a couple of weeks before the election of 1904 provides important clues to Walton’s state of mind and suggests that whatever happened had prompted him to consider altering his course. The subject of the piece was “the threatened secession from the parent body of the colored Jefferson Club.” Among the signers of the letter was

12. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 157. 13. See Gould’s St. Louis Directory for 1905, 1906, and 1907. In an obituary for J. Leubrie Hill, Walton recalled hearing him play the piano at the Grand Opera House, where Walton had an appointment with Ernest Hogan to arrange to go east with him. “A month later, June 1906,” he wrote, “found me in New York, and the ﬁrst money I ever received East for writing songs was with John Leubrie Hill.” They worked together on the Rufus Rastus show. See “Theatrical Profession Sustains Big Loss in Death of John Leubrie Hill,” New York Age, September 7, 1916, 6, col. 1–2.

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Tom Turpin, one of Walton’s friends. African American Democrats wanted to share in the spoils of election-day victory in wards where their votes made a difference and where they outnumbered white Democrats. They wanted assurance from the (white) Jefferson Club leaders that patronage would be distributed to faithful black party workers; without such an agreement, they warned their fellow Democrats, their votes “can and will be switched.” By itself this story is not very illuminating. Walton was, at this point in his life, a Republican. In fact, he spent election night with Republican Party friends, J. Finley Wilson, Charles and J. Milton Turner, Sam Patterson, and Louis Chauvin.14 The Turners, who had been prominent Democrats through much of the post-Reconstruction period, had recently switched party afﬁliation, J. Milton asserting, “there is no place in the democratic party for the black man.”15 Nevertheless, the content of the article is less interesting than the language Walton employed. The article is ﬁlled with bold, sharp-edged words and phrases. The headline announced: “Colored Club Issues Ukase to Democrats.” A “ukase,” or decree, carries weight and authority that a “demand” or a “petition”— either of which might have substituted for it—lacks. “Many of the heads of departments” had been put on “the black list” by the Colored Jefferson Club and had “been denounced in scathing terms.” To be blacklisted can mean to be censured, but its more particular meaning is to be denied employment. In Jim Crow America, the blacklisting of whites by blacks represents a noteworthy reversal of the usual power relationship. Moreover, “the colored Democrats put it right up to ofﬁcials to declare themselves on the matter of giving out a little of the ‘pie’ to the colored man.” This passage connotes more than subsistence; it’s a demand for a treat. One additional sentence stands out. “The ultimatum is that in case some recognition is not given, and that quickly, there will be ‘something doin’ at the polls on election day.”16 The meaning is clear—either promise patronage,

14. J. Finley Wilson to Walton, September 28, 1946, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 16/26. 15. For the recent switch in parties, see “Read and Think,” St. Louis Palladium, October 1, 1904, 8, col. 3; and “Politics,” St. Louis Palladium, October 8, 1904, 5, col. 3. J. Milton Turner is a fascinating ﬁgure in his own right. I have found nothing in Walton’s papers that indicates a close friendship, but the rhetoric Walton deployed to attract African American voters to the Democratic Party in the 1920s and 1930s bears a striking resemblance to Turner’s. For more on Turner, see Kremer, James Milton Turner and the Promise of America; Lawrence O. Christensen, “J. Milton Turner: An Appraisal,” 1– 19; and N. Webster Moore, “James Milton Turner, Diplomat, Educator, and Defender of Rights, 1840–1915,” 194–201. 16. “Colored Club Issues Ukase to Democrats,” St. Louis Star, October 19, 1904, 1, col. 1.

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or the black vote will go to Republicans—but the colorful phrase “something doin’” is coy and coded. Walton would use the phrase at the Age in 1909 when he wrote about an organization formed by William Morris to challenge the monopoly of power enjoyed by the United Booking Agency. “There is going to be something doing before long in the vaudeville world that is likely to alter the complexion of things considerably.”17 Morris’s circuit would not reach the heights attained by S. H. Dudley’s Theater Owner Booking Association in the following decade, but the shake-up, signiﬁed by the “something doing” predicted by Walton, promised to revise both economic and race relations. In 1904, the phrase had particular resonance among African American musicians in St. Louis. A year earlier, Scott Joplin and one of his Sedalia protégés, Scott Hayden, placed Something Doing, a cakewalk march, with the Val. A. Reis Music Co. in St. Louis. Weeping Willow, Palm Leaf Rag, and Something Doing, all published in 1903, were the first pieces Joplin published with a company other than John Stark and Son since their falling out over the composer’s classical aspirations. John Stark had published Maple Leaf Rag in 1899, propelling Joplin into the national spotlight. It was Stark who dubbed the Texan “The King of Ragtime Writers,” and except for a couple of works in 1901 and 1902, he published the compositions that established Joplin’s popularity. Profits accrued from Joplin’s works persuaded Stark to move his music business from Sedalia, Missouri, to St. Louis in 1900, where he could reach a larger, more lucrative market. But when Joplin began working on more ambitious projects—a ballet called The Ragtime Dance and an opera called The Guest of Honor— Stark balked. It took nearly three years for Joplin to convince Stark to publish The Ragtime Dance, and because it was an elaborate performance piece that called for vocalists, dancers, and an able pianist to get the full effect, it ﬂopped miserably. Stark refused even to consider publishing a more ambitious opera. The Guest of Honor, which Joplin tried to stage independently in 1903, was undoubtedly a musical tribute to Booker T. Washington and Theodore Roosevelt, who had dined together in the White House. When he failed to ﬁnd a backer for the project, Joplin was forced to publish its constituent parts, a result of which is that it is lost as a coherent work. Joplin and Stark had reached an impasse in 1903, and the publication of Something Doing by Reis represented something of a declaration of inde-

17. “Theatrical Comment,” New York Age, January 21, 1909, 6, col. 1.

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pendence for the composer. He would return to Stark in later years, but he no longer relied on him, and he never turned away from his aspirations.18 By couching the black Democrats’ revolt against white leadership of the party in the terms of “something doin,’” Walton allied their struggle with that of Joplin for independence. As a man about to explore other professional endeavors, Walton, too, was ready to bolt. But from what? In an article published in the Age ﬁve years later under the intriguing title, “When Is a Negro a Negro?” Walton argued, We, of the so-called black race declare among ourselves that it is not a very difﬁcult matter to determine one another’s identity; but those of the white race, at times, show such lamentable ignorance in determining “who is who,” that we are beginning to wonder by what standard do they differentiate as to when is a Negro a Negro? Since the St. Louis World’s Fair, when hundreds of dark-skinned people came to this country, it has been even more perplexing to the white citizens to make the racial distinctions along their peculiar lines. Added to this is the fact that the Negro is increasing in culture and reﬁnement at a fast rate; and, after hearing from time to time some ludicrous story of mistaken race identity on the part of some white person, leads me to form the conclusion that after all it is not so much a case of color and appearance as ways, mannerisms and deportment.

The remainder of the article offers several examples of individuals who took advantage of their ambiguous racial identity to pass.19 Walton’s 1909 article aside, the St. Louis World’s Fair is not usually regarded as a watershed moment in race relations. Cases of passing and racial masquerade as well as confusion about race certainly predated the celebration in 1904. It’s Walton’s linking of the St. Louis World’s Fair and racial passing that suggests that something very personal happened to him in the summer of 1904, dislodging him from his “ﬁrst love”—working on a metropolitan daily newspaper. In all of his reﬂections on his early career, he never explained why he left St. Louis, his home, and his family. And while commenting on passing as a journalist was appropriate, it would have been hard to admit his own experience, and he might have feared that such an admission would damage his credibility as a “race man.”

18. For a longer discussion of the relationship between Joplin and Stark, see Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune, 98–128. For insight into this particular conﬂict as well as Joplin’s publishing history, see Rudi Blesh, “Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist,” in Vera Brodsky Lawrence, ed., Scott Joplin: Complete Piano Works, xxii–xxvii. 19. “When Is a Negro a Negro?” New York Age, April 22, 1909, 6, col. 1–2. Emphasis added.

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Only one other cryptic clue remains. In 1953, almost a half century since his summer of silence, Walton returned to St. Louis in triumph. His status in the world of journalism was no longer in doubt: he had edited the music and drama page of the Age for more than a decade; he had written features—with a byline—for the New York World for another decade; and in 1951 he had been inducted into the Society of Silurians, an association of New York City newspapermen that admitted new members based on their signiﬁcant accomplishments in the ﬁeld of journalism.20 He had been appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to represent the nation as U.S. minister to Liberia from 1935 to 1946. He had set in motion the minor revolution in the newspaper world that resulted in the capitalization of Negro. And now, he had been asked by the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to write an essay that reﬂected on the dramatic changes in race relations he had witnessed. “What I Have Lived to See,” written when he was seventy-four, is a bittersweet memory that tries very hard to end on a positive note. “Throughout the land, particularly south of the Mason and Dixon Line, there are unmistakable signs of an appreciable changing attitude for the better with respect to racial tolerance and civil treatment of all Americans in places of public accommodation.” He went on, “This evolutionary social transition, which makes for real democracy, human dignity, and a united United States, I have lived to see.” Walton opened the essay, however, on a much darker note. Many years ago when I was a reporter on the staff of a St. Louis daily, I was assigned to interview a famous bandmaster who was registered at a nationally known hotel. I refused to take the freight elevator as directed and informed the city desk of my implacable stand. It was not until after a heated argument ensued over the telephone between one of the editors and hotel clerk that I was permitted to ride on a passenger elevator.21

Even at a distance of ﬁve decades, Walton does not name his employer, the subject he was to interview, or the hotel where the “unpleasant incident,” as he called it, occurred. He also doesn’t ﬁnish the story. He leaves it to the reader to conclude that the city editor stood up for him and the interview

20. When Walton was unanimously approved for admission to the Society of Silurians in 1951, he was the ﬁrst African American to be so honored. See Walton to Raymond L. Crowley (managing editor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch), November 15, 1951, LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 7; and Walton to Ed Sullivan, November 16, 1951, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 17. 21. Lester A. Walton, “What I Have Lived to See,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 4, 1953. The emphasis is in the original.

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was published. He may have conducted the interview and written the story, but the city editor did not publish it—no such story appeared in the pages of the Star during Walton’s tenure. The absence of any golf reports during a tournament that brought outstanding amateurs to the city clubs, whose fortunes he had celebrated, suggests another unspoken—perhaps for Walton, unspeakable—ending to this story. In the summer of 1904, Walton’s performance of whiteness gave way to a life of struggle on the other side of the color line.

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As U.S. minister to Liberia from 1935 to 1946, Walton took his concerns about racial equality to the world of international relations. Stationed in Liberia, Walton acted on many of the beliefs he had articulated in 1913 regarding the transnational aspects of race and the power of mass media to inform attitudes toward African Americans. Although proud of his racial background, Walton insisted that friends, associates, and journalists refer to him as the U.S. minister, not the Negro minister, for his position of power promised to demonstrate what Boasian science had found decades earlier—skin color did not determine character or ability. In this phase of his life—the decade in which he turned sixty—Walton’s race was no longer in question and, for much of his tenure in the diplomatic corps, neither was his skill as a negotiator or U.S. representative. But even success and power could not protect him from the racism that persisted in the United States well into the twentieth century, nor could his commendable service in Liberia guarantee him a place in the annals of wartime diplomacy. This story is one of treachery, however, not of duplicity. In 1942, Walton left his post in Monrovia for about a year to complete work on a special assignment President Roosevelt had given him two years earlier. In 1936 and again in 1940, Walton had taken part in FDR’s reelection campaign. In the most recent, Roosevelt had received an unprecedented third term, and it was while in consultation with Roosevelt that Walton had been asked to assess the morale of African Americans 134

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while crisscrossing the country as a member of the Speakers’ Bureau. In April 1942, the Ofﬁce of Facts and Figures had Walton’s report, and he was back in the country to discuss it and Liberia in the now-changed circumstances of world war. Walton was not the only person of color brought into these discussions, but it was an assignment that he relished because it allowed him to parlay his status as a Roosevelt appointee into signiﬁcant policy changes for the race. Something, however, went awry. On his return to the United States from Monrovia, Walton was routed through Miami instead of New York. No ﬁrst-class hotel in the city accepted African American guests. Walton did not speak of the humiliation or anger—or, for that matter, the irony—that accompanied this exclusion until three years later, when he wrote his sonin-law, Percy Rochester, and an old friend, Henry Minton, essentially the same letter. He described his recent trip in early 1945 from New York to Monrovia, which included a stop, once again, in Miami. “I traveled on an ATC plane from Miami,” he wrote Rochester. “There I stayed at the Florida Hotel and received very courteous treatment from the Commanding Ofﬁcer down to the waitresses and female elevator operators. Word was sent ahead to the various bases of my coming where I was met by the Commanding Ofﬁcer and given every facility.” To Minton he added, “This was quite a different experience from three years ago.”1 It’s not hard to infer from these letters what had happened in 1942. But to compound his frustration—on the heels of preparing a report on the morale of African American citizens—it was reported in U.S. newspapers that on his return to Monrovia in March 1943, Walton “had asked the State Department to arrange his itinerary so as to avoid a stop at Miami. Failed by the Department, the distinguished emissary of 130,000,000 proud people was forced to spend two days in a boarding house.”2 It was more than a month before Walton reported back to Washington, and in a letter to Gen. Edwin M. Watson (FDR’s secretary), he kept his remarks brief: “I left New York for Miami February 19, and arrived at Liberia on March 4. Some trip.”3 Some trip, indeed. It was one thing to arrive in a Jim Crow city unannounced without reservations waiting; it was altogether something else 1. Walton to Percy Rochester, March 13, 1945, and Walton to Henry M. Minton, March 12, 1945, both in LAWPA, box 12, ﬁle 9. 2. “Barclay’s Proposed Visit Disturbs State Department,” in CABPA, box 187, folder 1. This news clipping shows a dateline of March 4, Philadelphia, but the newspaper is not identiﬁed. I assume, from the slant of the article and its inclusion in Barnett’s papers (which contain dozens of clippings from newspapers afﬁliated with his Associated Negro Press), that the article came from the Philadelphia Enquirer. 3. Walton to General Edwin M. Watson, April 12, 1943, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942.

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when he asked the State Department to intercede on his behalf and his colleagues failed to do so. It may have been the memory of this embarrassment that prompted Walton ten years later to “put in a long distance call from New York” to St. Louis to conﬁrm that he could stay at a ﬁrst-class hotel in his hometown, as N. A. Sweets, editor of the St. Louis American, had assured him.4 But I suspect that the memory of staying in something less than accommodations ﬁt for a U.S. diplomat contained other haunting elements, too. For Walton’s work on behalf of better race relations in the United States, conducted over several months in 1942 and 1943, ensured that he would remain in the shadows should any improvement be recorded. His return to Monrovia in February 1943 meant that he missed Franklin Roosevelt’s impromptu stop in Monrovia in January, in the aftermath of the conference held in Casablanca in late 1942, and Liberian President Edwin Barclay’s and President-elect William V. S. Tubman’s ofﬁcial state visit to the United States in June 1943. As Walton expressed it to President Roosevelt, “I am out of Liberia when you visit President Barclay and I am out of the United States when he visits you. The ‘breaks’ seem to have been against me.”5 Had Walton been in Liberia when Roosevelt came to call, he could have basked in the glory of his success over the past six and a half years to establish good relations between the Liberians and the Firestone Rubber plantations. The president could have seen ﬁrsthand what a writer for the African Nationalist wrote about Walton when he returned to Liberia in March 1943: “Minister Walton’s popularity in this country is due to the fact that he understands quite fully the outlook and aspirations of Liberians and appreciates the manifold difﬁculties under which we labour; the manner in which he approaches Liberian affairs is so much in keeping with Roosevelt’s good neighbourly [sic] policy, that in him we cannot help feeling the force of the Roosevelt regime.”6 Walton had been the ﬁrst diplomat assigned to Monrovia after the United States broke ofﬁcial relations with the republic because of the League of Nations’ investigation into charges of slavery, and now, in 1943, he was a pillar of the administration in a time of war. Walton had, by the time of Roosevelt’s visit, negotiated ﬁve treaties, the most important of which was the Air Navigation Arrange4. Walton, “What I Have Lived to See.” 5. Walton to Roosevelt, July 6, 1943, FDRPA, PPF 7268, folder Walton, Lester A. 6. “American Minister, Walton, Returns: An Ideal Representative of Roosevelt’s Good-Neighbourly Policy,” African Nationalist 5 (March 27, 1943). A clipping of this article was sent by Walton “to the President for his perusal.” See Walton to Edwin M. Watson, April 12, 1943, and attachments in FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942.

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ment between the United States and Liberia that conferred “most favored nation status for air routes and air transport service” on both countries, a treaty that helped pave the way for the construction of an airﬁeld in Liberia, which Walton soon would negotiate.7 Had Walton been in the United States when Barclay and Tubman came to call, he would have witnessed, and, no doubt, participated in, a pathbreaking state visit. When heads of state came to Washington at the invitation of the president, they expected to be hosted in ﬁne fashion. They typically stayed at Blair House, and as Drew Pearson, a nationally known journalist whose “Merry-Go-Round” column appeared regularly in the Washington Post, put it, “Barclay would be entitled to stay” there, too. But an Americo-Liberian in Washington, it was feared by many, might “disturb social customs and practices” in a nation still uneasy about equal race relations. The most recent Negro visitor, President Lescot of Haiti, had “saved embarrassment al-round, by making his visit ‘unofﬁcial.’” Advisedly so. His predecessor had been refused accommodations in a Miami hotel unless he reserved an entire ﬂoor.8 No such misunderstandings accompanied Barclay’s and Tubman’s visit to the United States. They stayed in the White House for the ﬁrst night, “the ﬁrst persons of African origin” to do so, and they spent the remainder of their time in the capital in Blair House. Barclay addressed the Senate and the House of Representatives, traveled to Akron, Ohio, to meet with the Firestones, and he and Tubman were feted in gala style in New York City. Even Secretary of State Cordell Hull, “a widely known devotee of Jim Crow,” hosted a dinner for Barclay and his entourage at the Carlton Hotel.9 Walton managed to acquire twenty-one black-and-white glossy photographs that documented the Liberians’ history-making visit to the United States. They are included in his archives. On the back of each photograph, one ﬁnds a typed caption that identiﬁes key ﬁgures and explains the events being recorded, indicating that they were meant to accompany press releases and to illustrate news stories about the visit. The New York

7. See the text of this and other treaties in LAWPA, box 14, ﬁle 6. 8. “Barclay’s Proposed Visit Disturbs State Department.” 9. “President Barclay of Liberia Visits United States,” African Interpreter 1 (summer 1943): 9; “Liberia President to Be Honored with Formal Dinner June 11 at Hotel Roosevelt,” New York Age, June 5, 1943, 4, col. 2–3; “Liberian President and President-Elect Leave Washington after Receiving Honors of Nation,” New York Age, June 5, 1943, 1, col. 3–5; “President of Liberia to Arrive in U.S.A. as Guest of Roosevelt,” New York Age, May 29, 1943, 1, col. 7. The reference to Hull’s racism appears in “Barclay’s Proposed Visit Disturbs State Department.” Gladys Walton did not return to Liberia with her husband, and she was part of the dinner party that hosted the Liberian ofﬁcials in New York.

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Age, not surprisingly, made extensive use of the pictures. On the back of one picture featuring “Brig. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, highest ranking Negro ofﬁcer in the U.S. Army, who accompanied Mr. Barclay to Washington; President Barclay; Representative Sol Bloom, chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives; and President-Elect W. V. S. Tubman of Liberia,” however, appears a note restricting the distribution of this image: “NOT FOR USE IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AUSTRALIA, OR WESTERN HEMISPHERE. APPROVED BY APPROPRIATE U.S. AUTHORITY.”10 It is not clear why this image was singled out for limited use, but the warning itself offers some insight into how the government worked with mass media outlets to manage potential concerns about this display of social equality with and respect for African leaders. Beyond the contents of this collection, what is intriguing is that it became part of Walton’s archives—that it kept alive for him the memory of an event in which he was not a participant. Walton’s unfortunate travel arrangements in 1942 and 1943 and his relative lack of written commentary on the experiences point to an episode that haunted him for years. “Some trip” masks much more than it reveals. But it was just one element in a much larger drama of Walton’s work and his subsequent invisibility in the history of both U.S. foreign relations and the modern civil rights movement. What follows is a companion story that coincided with—and may have been entangled in—Walton’s stay in the United States in the early years of the war. It is ultimately more disturbing than Walton’s embarrassment in Miami. Shortly after Walton’s departure from Liberia in 1942, Sumner Welles, undersecretary of state, sent President Roosevelt an urgent memo calling for Walton’s removal from the post in Monrovia. Lt. Col. Harry A. McBride, on special assignment in Liberia, had sent several telegrams to the State Department that strongly [recommend] that an unusually forceful and thoroughly experienced career Foreign Service Ofﬁcer should be placed in charge of our Legation in Monrovia for the duration of the war. Owing to the great increase in American interests in Liberia, including a wide variety of defense and military matters, Colonel McBride feels that this is an important subject from the standpoint of both the State Department and the War Department, and that action should be taken before he [McBride] leaves Monrovia in about three weeks.

10. LAWPC, box 3, #11082, 11085–11091, 11093, 11095–11101, 11105–11107, 11109, and 11117. The caption appears on 11117.

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Welles offered the president a delicate way of ushering Walton out—tell him that leaving the “tropical post” after so many years would do him good, and offer him a position as coordinator of information for Negro radio stations and newspapers (or something to that effect) as another way he could serve the nation during wartime. Welles noted “Mr. Walton’s commendable record of service,” but he was insistent. Both the War Department and the State Department wanted Walton out. The president’s curt reply suggests that he either did not grasp what Welles was recommending or disagreed with the advice: “If we were to do this, what would you do in regard to keeping Mr. Lester A. Walton in the State Department?”11 The president chose not to act on this recommendation, and Walton continued to represent the United States in Liberia until 1946, several months after Roosevelt’s untimely death. In fact, well before the U.S. entry into World War II, Walton demonstrated a ﬁrm grasp of Liberia’s strategic importance, which he conveyed in detailed reports to the president and ofﬁcials in the State Department, and he proved to be a skillful negotiator when the administration followed recommendations in his reports. In September 1940, for example, Walton sent a report entitled “The Importance of American Air Terminals in Liberia,” which began, “In view of Germany and Italy’s recent military and economic penetration of spheres of inﬂuence in Africa, and Germany’s bloodless invasion of Dakar, capital of Senegal, Liberia is becoming more and more of particular interest to the United States.” He noted that Monrovia was but forty miles farther than Dakar from Natal, Brazil, making it a “strategic point” in West Africa with regard to ﬂights between South America and Africa. Monrovia was also an ideal “transatlantic terminal” for ﬂights originating in the United States, a point Walton had been making to the Civil Aeronautics Board without success since before Germany’s invasion of Poland. Moreover, Franco’s Spain had been actively seeking a concession from Liberia to establish an “aviation camp,” a move successfully thwarted by the aviation treaty Walton had negotiated in early 1939, and now Germany was using Dakar as a “West African point of contact with South America,” and “it requires no stretch of the imagination to construe a deeper signiﬁcance.” He concluded his missive with the observation that “my government will be displaying commendable foresight by establishing in the near future transatlantic air bases in Liberian territory.” In reply, FDR notiﬁed Walton that he was sending the report

11. Welles to FDR, February 26, 1942, and FDR to Welles, February 27, 1942, in FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942.

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to the secretaries of state, war, and the navy and to the Civil Aeronautics Board.12 (By July 1941 a contract between Pan American Airways Company and the Liberian government had been signed, and the following January, Liberians and Walton’s staff at the U.S. legation celebrated the arrival of the ﬁrst Pan American Airways plane in Liberia.)13 As negotiations between Pan American and Liberia got under way, Walton sent a detailed letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, outlining a plan of action for Liberia in the face of impending war. “Regardless of how and when the world war eventuates,” Walton wrote, “Liberia is destined to be directly affected; and no matter who wins the war, Liberia, thrown into the international melting pot, must stand the acid test and justify its existence as an independent, sovereign state in the community of nations.” Walton asserted Liberia’s “strategic geographic importance as an air and naval base,” and he reminded Hull of the republic’s virtually untapped natural resources. He proposed a twelve-point program to cultivate “effective cooperation” between the two nations that would serve the best interests of both. Among the twelve points were the introduction of modern agricultural practices, the improvement of transportation within Liberia and between Liberia and the outside world, a geological survey of Liberia’s mineral wealth, and the establishment of modern health, sanitation, and monetary systems. It was, as Walton noted, “an ambitious, constructive program” that would require a heavy investment of capital, scientiﬁc expertise, and technology. But in the end, Liberia’s development would redound to the beneﬁt of the United States as well as to the citizens of the African republic.14 One of the most important natural resources of the African republic was, of course, rubber, about which Walton wrote nothing. The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company leased one million acres of land in Liberia and had been cultivating the trees since the late 1920s. Both Walton and ofﬁcials at the State Department understood that the Firestone plantations played a key role in the economic, social, and political life of Liberia, and during the early years of the war they became a vital part of the U.S. war effort. Walton had a long history with the Firestones. He had visited Liberia in the late 1920s to prepare an article for Current History on Firestone’s investment, and privately, he reached an agreement with the Firestones to place a positive spin on their work in Liberia in a regular stream of press releases to 12. Walton to Edwin M. Watson, September 14, 1940; Roosevelt to Walton, September 27, 1940; and “The Importance of American Air Terminals in Liberia,” all in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 8. 13. See contract, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 16; and Lester A. Walton, “Fisherman Lake,” 438–39, 444. 14. Walton to Cordell Hull, May 22, 1941, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 16.

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American—principally African American—newspapers. Firestone supported Walton’s appointment as U.S. minister to Liberia in 1935 and in the following years beneﬁted from Walton’s commitment to smoothing relations with the Liberian government, which the minister believed would contribute to the development and modernization of Liberia even as it shored up the rubber plantations. The Firestones worked closely with the U.S. government in the rapid construction of Roberts Field, Liberia’s ﬁrst airstrip, which facilitated the U.S. military’s movement of troops and sped up the delivery of tons of rubber to plants in the United States, plants that manufactured essential materials for the war effort. The Roosevelt administration entrusted Walton with the task of explaining, as delicately as possible, to President Barclay that the new airﬁeld would initially serve military, not commercial, purposes.15 Before war erupted in Europe, Walton had established himself as an able expert on the history of Liberia. Lengthy reports that Walton submitted between 1935 and 1939 articulated Liberia’s long, troubled history of boundary disputes with France and England, whose colonial holdings adjoined, and occasionally encroached upon, Liberian territory. He offered analyses of Liberia’s efforts to reorganize its ﬁnances, which had been its greatest source of political and economic turbulence, and he described the state of education and economic development (apart from the cultivation of rubber). Walton also kept the State Department apprised of the Liberian government’s policies regarding the administration of villages located in the hinterland, because this touchy intercultural relationship had boiled over in controversy—over corrupt administration, unjust taxation, and questionable labor practices—frequently over the years. And he had kept steady pressure on the U.S. government to deliver on its promise of a new legation to replace “the ramshackled [sic] building” he and Gladys occupied on their arrival. The new building, dedicated on March 31, 1941, cost around $100,000 to build, and it was hailed by Liberian Secretary of State C. L. Simpson as “a monument to mark the historic interests between America and Liberia,” and

15. Hassan B. Sisay, Big Powers and Small Nations: A Case Study of United States–Liberian Relations, 135–36; Lief, The Firestone Story, 321–38; and Beecher, “The Second World War and U.S. Politico-Economic Expansionism,” 391–412. Walton’s relationship with the Firestones is documented in a handful of letters in CABPA, and his understanding of and sensitivity toward the relations between Firestone and Liberian leaders is best illustrated in a report called “Finances,” in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. For his article, see Walton, “Liberia’s New Industrial Development,” 108–14. For a summary of the correspondence related to the uses of Roberts Field and Walton’s responsibility for informing Barclay of its initial use, see a cross-reference titled Welles, Hon. Sumner, 11– 7-41, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942.

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by President Barclay as a symbol of “the permanence of those close political and spiritual relations which unite our two governments and peoples.16 In light of Walton’s strong record as U.S. minister to Liberia, Colonel McBride’s and Sumner Welles’s recommendations for his removal are curious. Welles’s two-page memo to FDR included no references to speciﬁc evidence of Walton’s purported inexperience. His proposal to shunt Walton into work with the Negro press and radio stations devalued both Walton’s knowledge of Liberia and his cordial relations with Liberian leaders. While Walton’s past experience as a journalist, publicist, and publicity director for the Colored Division of the Democratic Party suited him for such a position, his engagement in that ﬁeld of endeavor would have come at the cost of disrupting relations with a country that now took on great signiﬁcance in the execution of a successful war against the Axis powers. Although Walton certainly did not occupy the inner circle of policymakers in the State Department, he did understand the aims of the Roosevelt administration and must have been privy to some of the advance planning for war. In October 1940, Walton had proposed to the State Department that he return to Liberia on a cruiser, instead of a passenger ship, to “enable air, navy and war experts to . . . make a careful study of Liberia and the West African Coast.” When Roosevelt was apprised of Walton’s suggestion, he wrote to Welles, urging him to try to accommodate Walton. “I think Walton is a good man,” FDR insisted. “If the cruiser now on the way to Liberia makes a report suggesting further study of that Republic, I think Walton’s idea is pretty good.” The secretary of the navy thought the plan “highly improbable,” a milder response than Roosevelt had anticipated—FDR assumed that “[t]he ofﬁcers of the Naval service would, of course, have a ﬁt.” Watson, however, reported to Walton that “if a cruiser is sent again to Liberia, they will endeavor to have you as a passenger.”17

16. For the following reports: CONCESSIONS, SUPREME COURT, BUILDING SITES, EDUCATION, AVIATION, KRU CONTROVERSY, and FINANCES, see LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. LIBERIAN BORDERS: BACKGROUND AND PRESENT STATUS, LAWPA, box 13, ﬁle 12. For a summary of policies regarding the Liberian administration of the hinterland, see Walton to Cordell Hull, March 2, 1940, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 16. The description of the old legation appears in BUILDING SITES, and the comments from Simpson and Barclay on the new building appear in the printed program prepared for the dedication, Remarks on the Occasion of the Formal Opening of the American Legation Building, Monrovia, Liberia, March 31, 1941, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, 2: A5, ﬁle Liberia, 1941–1949. 17. Walton to General Edwin Watson, October 3, 1940; FDR to Sumner Welles, October 10, 1940; Welles to FDR, October 17, 1940; and Watson to Walton, October 23, 1940, all in FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942.

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In fairness to Welles and McBride, Walton had proven himself to be an excellent “information coordinator.” In fact, he was on leave in the United States in 1940 primarily to work on the presidential campaign. In his letter to Roosevelt, requesting return passage on a navy cruiser, Walton alluded brieﬂy and with characteristic modesty to this work. Acknowledging that he had given “quite a number of informal talks” and had “just completed for the Democratic National Committee lists of Negro speakers,” he indicated that he would not be able “to speak as often as I had planned.”18 His modesty notwithstanding, Walton had been working feverishly since 1939 to help coordinate the campaign among African American voters. He had written to James A. Farley, head of the Democratic National Committee, early in 1939 to spell out a “feeling of discontent among Harlem democratic voters” that stemmed from the relative paucity of patronage positions awarded to black Democrats and that threatened the continued success of the party. After offering a history of the effort to attract African American voters to the Democrats—a history in which Walton was a major ﬁgure—Walton urged Farley to consider the situation in Harlem seriously and to counteract efforts made by Republicans to win back “thousands of former Negro republicans.”19 Toward the end of the year, Walton wrote Charles E. Hall, asking for information on African American businesses, wealth, ofﬁceholders, and taxes. The statistics he sought were foundational to the arguments he planned to make in campaign literature the following year, so he gathered the facts in advance so he could ﬁgure out how to deploy them as evidence of the beneﬁts of voting for the Democratic candidate.20 The following spring he maintained regular contact with Charles Michelson, director of publicity for the Democratic National Committee, offering advice for the strongest appeals that could be made to voters. By October, it was widely understood that Walton was “in charge of Negro activities during the campaign.”21 Already in 1940, well before the U.S. entered the war, Walton anticipated possible effects of a war effort on U.S. race relations, and he offered to help

18. Walton to Roosevelt, October 3, 1940, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. 19. Walton to James A. Farley, March 4, 1939, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. 20. Walton to Charles E. Hall, November 4, 1939, LAWPA, box 10, ﬁle 10. 21. Walton to Charles Michelson, May 3, 1940; Michelson to Walton, May 21, 1940; Edward L. Roddan to Walton, June 10, 1940; Roddan to Walton, May 29, 1940; Walton to Reverdy C. Ransom, August 8 and August 25, 1940; and Paul C. Aiken to Daniel F. Wolcott, October 10, 1940, all in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. Quoted material is in the letter from Aiken.

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the president “whether in the United States during leave of absence, or otherwise, at any time you feel I am particularly ﬁtted to perform any duty in the interest of our National Defense.” Roosevelt requested a meeting with Walton in mid-September, and about a week later, a ﬂurry of news items indicate that their discussion fused race relations, war preparations, and the president’s efforts to retain African American support in the upcoming election. The Pittsburgh Courier reported, for example, that after conferring with FDR, Walton “learned from a high ofﬁcial source that not more than 10 per cent of Negroes conscripted to selective service will serve in labor battalions. In the [First] World War, the majority of labor troops were made up of Negro draftees.” Furthermore, Walton reported that black soldiers would make up 10 percent of “various combat units.” As the New York Amsterdam News interpreted this report, “America’s Negro population will be fully integrated into the armed forces of the country.”22 The clippings Walton sent to the Oval Ofﬁce provide interesting evidence of his effort to demonstrate the administration’s commitment to just race relations and his ability to target the African American population with news it likely would welcome. Walton’s quick work in this important matter may also have convinced Roosevelt of Walton’s usefulness inside the administration. Not long after the U.S. declared war he turned to Walton again for assistance. Promises made during the heat of a campaign are not always easy to keep. Roosevelt had won reelection in part because the predicted hemorrhaging of African American votes had been staunched by a concerted effort to reach black voters with speeches and pamphlets designed especially for them. As ﬁrms began gearing up for war production in the aftermath of the election, it was not clear that black workers would be hired in the expansion—even if they might be integrated into the military when war ﬁnally came. A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement gathered steam in the months following FDR’s inauguration, and after December 7, 1941, the Roosevelt administration could not afford to ﬁght a war on two fronts—at home and abroad. Lester Walton was among those asked by the administration to identify the sources of African American discontent and to make recommendations for their alleviation.

22. “Roosevelt and Walton in Confab: Minister to Liberia Discusses Conscription of Negroes,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 21, 1940; and “Fairness in Draft Certain: Negroes Not to Be Herded in Labor Battalions, Minister Learns,” New York Amsterdam News, September 21, 1940. See also “Labor Troops Not to Exceed Ten Percent, Walton Is Assured,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 21, 1940; and “War Dept. to Use 10 Per Cent of Negroes in All Combat Units,” New York Age, September 21, 1940, in FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942.

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By the time the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported that “Mr. Walton has been entrusted with a delicate mission by President Roosevelt himself,” Walton’s ﬁrst report had been in the hands of the administration for nearly two months. Based on surveys and interviews conducted in January and February 1942, the report explained the “frustration, pessimism, cynicism and insecurity” expressed by American Negroes toward the war, attitudes, Walton insisted, that should not cast doubt on black patriotism and loyalty to the nation. African American morale suffered, he argued with clarity and force, because of long-standing inequities that were exacerbated by the current crisis and because of routine discrimination against Negroes in the armed services and on the home front in spite of the stated democratic aims of the war and unfulﬁlled promises of equal treatment. Because of their treatment, many African Americans sympathized with the Japanese as fellow colored people and opposed a full-scale war against Japan in spite of the horriﬁc attack on Pearl Harbor—although in some cases it was because “the success of the ‘little yellow men’ may help to reduce the arrogance of white people.” In his summary, Walton made two recommendations: “the government must demonstrate that this is not a race war,” and “efforts must be made to remove prejudice so that discrimination in the armed services, war industries, civilian defense, housing, etc., may be reduced.” In short, Walton, without actually using the term, advocated a double victory—to secure real democracy overseas and at home.23 In a letter to Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state, in late April, after his other reports had been distributed to and discussed by the Board of Facts and Figures and the Committee on War Information, Walton argued forcefully that unless some independent bureau were established to oversee interracial issues, “‘sins of omission’” as well as overtly racist acts would continue to enﬂame African American anger. He wrote of “colored soldiers” and their families embittered by Jim Crow practices and insisted that “[a] stop should be put to these injustices.” The agency not only would advocate black interests when new policies were introduced and troubleshoot problems that sprang up, but would also be responsible for circulating positive achievements of Negro citizens and soldiers to Negro newspapers and the daily press to give all Americans a different way of thinking about African Americans as productive and patriotic citizens. In the accompanying memo, “Bad Publicity,” Walton asserted that the absence of any single agency in

23. “Lester Walton Reported on Secret Mission for FDR,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, May 9, 1942, clipping in LAWPA, box 23, ﬁle 2. For the ﬁrst report see M E M O R A N D U M, March 16, 1942, in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 13.

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charge of coordinating federal policy with an eye to including African Americans as full participants in the war effort led the race to conclude, “Colored people are being neglected, abused and their rights nulliﬁed during the present crisis.” Walton even volunteered to help “organize just such a central body.”24 Nothing could have been more heartening to Walton than to have the ear of the president and some of his trusted advisors and to spell out precisely what needed to be done to rectify the widespread injustice and humiliation African Americans faced on a daily basis. Walton’s high-level work, however, would guarantee his erasure from the public record in both ﬁelds of endeavor—diplomacy and civil rights. Probably unknown to him, Welles and McBride had urged the president to ease Walton out of Liberia, and even though they had failed to persuade FDR to do so, they simply ignored Walton’s contributions to the war effort in Liberia. They penned chronicles of their work in establishing the air base, a new port facility, and the encampments of black troops in West Africa, and diplomatic historians took them at their word. Meanwhile, on the home front, copies of Walton’s letter and memo to Adolf Berle began circulating among well-placed African Americans who made up the socalled Black Cabinet, touching off a ﬁrestorm among black leaders jealously guarding their appointments. The materials were meant only for Berle and the OFF, but an employee in charge of mimeographing the report ran off a few extra copies for local black appointees, and one of the copies made its way into the hands of Claude A. Barnett. He promptly prepared a press release that insinuated that Walton—his supposed friend— had selﬁsh motives for advocating a “Bureau of Negro Affairs.” In a follow-up article published in the Amsterdam New York Star News, A. M. Wendell Malliet reported, “It is said that the belief spread like wildﬁre that Walton wanted to do away with some Federal agencies with ‘big Negroes’ in fat jobs.” Rumors, jealousy, and innuendo cut short a possibility for federal-level activism to promote full citizenship for African Americans. Nothing in Walton’s memorandum or letter indicates a desire to shut down existing federal agencies or dismiss African American appointees. But members of the Black Cabinet read those motives into the report anyway. One member, Robert Vann, had viewed Walton as a rival since the early 1930s, which might account for his taking part in the “stop Walton” plan that blocked the implementation of Walton’s ideas. Thanks to Bar-

24. “BAD PUBLICITY,” in LAWPA, box 11, ﬁle 15; Walton to Adolf Berle, April 29, 1942, in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1939–1964.

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nett’s misrepresentation of Walton’s agenda, black leaders in Washington marginalized Walton from the emerging civil rights movement.25 Throughout the ordeal, Walton held his head high. He even agreed to an interview with Malliet to clarify his aims. He explained privately to Barnett that he intended to minimize the scandal publicly, because he thought it would harm the race to expose the skullduggery and intraracial strife and would not reduce the hostility toward him. Walton complied with a directive in mid-June to speak at a Conference on African Affairs in Ohio and continue from there to make a “ﬁrst-hand study of the Negro in relation to our war effort” in Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. A month later, Berle thanked him for his “very ably prepared report” that he believed “will assist us greatly in reaching conclusions which, we trust, will enable us to perform a constructive service to the Negro people and at the same time enable them to render in full measure that patriotic participation in the nation’s war effort to which they rightly aspire.”26 Insofar as policy to support racial equality began to take shape in Roosevelt’s third term, no one identiﬁed Walton as a key contributor. Walton suspected that African Americans in appointed positions—especially those involved in the Fair Employment Policy Committee—undermined him until he left his post in Liberia in 1946. What’s ironic and tragic is that those working against him probably never knew that the newspaper articles that legitimized opinion favoring the FEPC had been written by a man they wrongly assumed was their enemy.27 After months of grueling work and travel on behalf of better interracial relations, Walton asked the State Department for assistance in avoiding the humiliation that he had been laboring so diligently to remove. Their failure, whether calculated to elicit his resignation or merely an oversight,

25. The May press release can be found in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1939– 1964; A. M. Wendell Malliet, “Walton and Black Cabinet Clash in D. C.,” Amsterdam New York Star News, June 6, 1942, in LAWPA, box 15, black scrapbook. See also Walton to Barnett, May 16, 1942, in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1939–1964. For a brief discussion of the Black Cabinet and the names of its most prominent members, see Trotter, From a Raw Deal to a New Deal, 45. 26. Malliet, “Walton and Black Cabinet Clash”; Walton to Barnett, May 16, 1942, CABPA, box 188, file Lester Walton, 1939–1964; J. Howland Shaw to Walton, June 17, 1942, LAWPA, box 11, file 15; Adolf Berle to Walton, July 25, 1942, LAWPA, box 16, file 10. 27. The following letters indicate Walton’s suspicions: Walton to Lucian Garrett (his brother-in-law), July 23, 1945; and Walton to Henry M. Minton, July 24, 1945, both in LAWPA, box 12, ﬁle 14. A stack of press releases on fair hiring practices and on the aims of the FEPC dated from December 4, 1941, through June 10, 1942, along with several of Walton’s reports can be found in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 13.

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resulted in “some trip.” Every keystroke I have made to tell this story has felt like a stab and the resulting narrative a reopened wound. The will to remember Walton in all his complexity is to witness his forbearance in the face of opposition and to expose truths he kept hidden because he believed in a process and in people who betrayed him and who have left his restless spirit to wander in the cold annals of history where no room for him has been reserved. That, too, is some trip.

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Part III The Man Behind the Scenes

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Representation

Representation is central to democracy as it has developed in the United States. Representatives, as political stand-ins for the electorate, perform the work necessary for self-government. International representatives, like Walton as U.S. minister to Liberia, each serve as the “face” and “voice” of the nation in a foreign land and have the power to transact business on behalf of the nation. Nonpolitical meanings of representation, however, complicate this straightforward view of representative government. What, for example, is a “representative American”? Who typiﬁes and embodies generic American citizenship? How are individuals represented in art and letters; or to pose the question differently, how are they described, and what do their achievements mean? Insofar as historical writing seeks to analyze “important” events in the past, it, too, is concerned with representative moments—those which promise a fuller understanding of the fundamental workings of a polity, a society, a culture, or a people. As my relationship with Walton has evolved over the years, I have come to realize how central representation is to the past and the present and how dangerous misrepresentation can be for both our reckoning with the past and our processing of events of the present. Duplicity and treachery place blame on individuals for injustice, and they do help account for Walton’s absence from our collective memory. But in a larger and more important sense, representation and misrepresentation are products of a more systemic concern, and they occur as they do because of culture and socialization that prepare us to see things in a certain way and to discourage alternative views and perspectives. Those problems do not lie securely in times that are past and from which we have “progressed”—they are with us as part of the 151

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collective human condition. Indeed, in many ways modern information technologies compound the difﬁculty of observing, for the live broadcast, the nearly instantaneous online commentary on current events, or the instant message gives the impression of actuality and veracity. At the same time, that very authenticity occludes the matter of perspective or the world outside the frame of a projected image. And it obscures the interests served by the projection of one kind of image over another. I must confess that early on in our relationship, I had moments of doubt. I wondered if Walton was a sort of Walter Mitty, if his sense of importance sprang from living in a make-believe world where one is more daring, active, and exciting than in one’s drab and withdrawn real life. Did he exaggerate his “friendships” with people like W. E. B. Du Bois, James A. Farley, Herbert Bayard Swope, A. Philip Randolph, and Emmett J. Scott, for example, because he recognized them as having attained the legitimacy he so desperately craved? Did he magnify his work for the Democratic Party in the 1920s through 1940s? But then I would look over the notes I had made from materials in his archive— dozens of letters from these and other prominent individuals, each written by one friend and associate to another. Evidence in other archives corroborated his story as well. Walton’s perspective did not shed light on the whole story, but I don’t think he grossly misrepresented his role in journalism, diplomacy, politics, and civil rights activism. He was largely lost to history nonetheless. Representation has loomed large in this journey of discovery—both as a problem for scholars like me seeking ways to narrate the past and for citizens in a democracy trying to make sense of the world. In a sprawling nation like the United States, linked together by networks of communication rather than through organic communal ties, deciding what is news and then disseminating it, determining the nation’s best interests and persuading people to act on them, and inculcating national sentiment through shared values or the demonization of outsiders, all not only contribute to the creation of an “imagined community” but also become the building blocks of stories we tell ourselves about how the nation was formed and has progressed. The absence of an actor in the previous sentence also indicates how connected the media are to market capitalism and to the interplay between market forces and popular desires. In this curious way, the present is the past of the future, and both are produced like other commodities. How we represent “today”—and what we fail to include or the way we distort the story for cultural or political purposes—has lasting effects beyond the proﬁts made from “selling” news and information. Peo-

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ple, causes, and occurrences, once excluded, can only be reintroduced by disturbing accepted wisdom. Walton is one of those disturbing people, but not simply because he’s been left out. Through most of his adult life, Walton was in the business of crafting particular images designed for mass consumption, a reminder of the ways that politics, even in a democracy, works. He was representative of the twentieth-century American obsession with image and spin. At the same time, his job was to spin the mainstream in such a way that Negro voters would support the agenda of a party run by white politicians, and even when black votes reconﬁgured party alignments, neither they nor he were deemed part of the mainstream of American political life. His absence is a product of this contradiction. He is also a victim of our weak sense of archival consciousness. Historians, of course, are trained to seek out and make use of appropriate caches of letters and original documents, to interrogate those sources for potential biases, and to check documents from one repository against those of another—all in the name of objectivity and professional authority. But less often are historians encouraged to think about how archives are formed and how collections are described. Archival collections are not mere raw materials; they are monographic in the sense that archivists have to arrange, describe, and provide an overview of the contents. Archivists’ analytical work includes deciding which materials have enduring value and merit preservation as well as devising a scope-andcontent narrative to alert users as to what they will ﬁnd in a given set of papers. This work is conditioned, in turn, by prevailing standards of value, and it can inadvertently render some ﬁgures less visible than others. Walton was tangled up in all of these problems of representation. Indeed, in all of his professional endeavors, Walton was deeply concerned about representation, whether it was the manner in which African American life and culture were portrayed in print and on stage and screen or the need to shake up political party afﬁliation so as to produce ofﬁceholders who were duty-bound to represent the interests of black as well as white voters. Both as U.S. minister to Liberia and as a public relations specialist, Walton sought fresh ways of describing Liberia so as to beneﬁt the citizens of this African republic, to instill transnational racial solidarity, and to plant the idea in the white mind that Negroes were capable of self-governance. He strove, I think, to be both an American representative abroad and a representative American at home. What he implied by representative American, however, was not that he would be the darkskinned version of the iconic white citizen. Rather, he hoped that his work on the cultural front, in the world of journalism, and as a race man in the

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U.S. and Africa, would lead to the transformation of a physical ideal (of successful and powerful white manhood) to a principled ideal in which commitments to justice and democracy would translate into opportunity, education, nondiscriminatory remuneration for labor, political independence, and a celebration of the variety of expressive arts that nourished a distinctive American culture. In the end, however, representation made Walton a ghost. Many, if not most, Americans could not concede his status as “representative” of the citizenry of the United States, even if they acknowledged him as one of its representatives abroad. The establishing and strict policing of a color line by white America created a mental and cultural divide that made it nearly impossible to embrace nonwhite Americans as representatives of the American way of life, marked by prosperity, upward social mobility, and access to power. After all, the logic that supported the color line in all its manifestations—like Jim Crow seating, aversion to interracial marriage, and separate schools, hotels, and restaurants—was based on belief in a racial hierarchy in which whites were superior and people of color inferior. Men and women like Walton—and they were legion—belied this logic. They were the (white) nation’s “uncanny” in that their talents, achievements, and (black) embodiment of the purported cultural ideals were jarring and uncomfortable reminders of white America’s betrayal of its cherished faith in equality, meritocracy, and “liberty and justice for all.” Uncanny moments—described by Sigmund Freud as the misrecognition of strangers as self and the simultaneous sense of the self as a repugnant stranger—result in disquieting ruptures between our positive assessment of who we are and the repulsive qualities we prefer not to acknowledge. The encounter with the dark side often leads to suppression. But Walton was not suppressed only by white America; memory of his work and commitments was set aside by some activists in the civil rights movement as well, because his story did not square with their narrative of how the struggle for justice unfolded. The Lester Walton I have come to know and whom I have tried to introduce to you was bright, amiable, and ambitious and representative of all Americans who seek the main chance, work hard to get ahead, and want for their children more opportunities and better living conditions than they enjoyed. He’s representative of the contradictions and complexities Americans embodied in the twentieth century—tied to the ideal of warm family relations yet leaving home to seek greener pastures; articulating grand political ideals but participating in enterprises that don’t fully reﬂect them; turning a sunny face to the outside world and saving the resentments, jealousies, and pique for private laments; and living with a

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cultural, familial (both genetic and social), and regional inheritance that both forms and haunts the individual. But if we acknowledge him as such, we must be ready to enter the marshy bogs of representation to discover where, how, and by whose hand he was erased. And we may ﬁnd that the ﬁends responsible for Walton’s disappearance still patrol the unstable grounds of history, memory, and culture.

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In recent elections, African American voters have cast the majority of their ballots for the Democratic Party. Notwithstanding African American appointments to key leadership roles in the Departments of State and Defense and on the Supreme Court made by Republican presidents, it is commonplace for pundits, candidates, African American politicians, and African American voters to assert that the interests of the race are more apt to be addressed by Democrats than by Republicans. But African American voters in the past—when they were permitted to go to the polls—did not always pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party. For six decades following the Civil War, with a few notable exceptions, black voters associated the Democratic Party with the Ku Klux Klan and other night-riding terrorists and with the slaveholding class of antebellum America and their heirs during the Reconstruction period who worked tirelessly to nullify the constitutional guarantees of citizenship, voting rights, and due process. The “stolen election” of 1896 was but the most egregious violation of the democratic process in a region and time period marked by the Democratic leadership’s efforts to subordinate a newly freed people. To declare oneself a member of the party of Lincoln was to align oneself with emancipation from slavery, with voting rights, and with African American citizenship. The decision to leave the party of Lincoln was not made lightly nor did it happen very quickly. And given black voters’ long-standing loyalty to the Republican Party, one would assume that the arguments deployed by 156

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the Democrats to attract their votes were clever and persuasive. Yet the director of publicity in the 1920s and 1930s, when the campaign to dislodge African Americans from the party of Lincoln began in earnest, remains virtually unknown and inexplicably detached from the formulation of a message and its underlying ideology that encouraged voters to reﬂect on their political interest. But if we coax Walton out of the shadows, we discover not only key political issues presented to black voters and their deep roots in a tradition of political independence but also the personal and calculated manner in which democratic political campaign materials were generated in the twentieth century. For Walton’s status as a longtime Republican gave him insights into arguments that might have an effect on black voters, and his youth in St. Louis made him familiar with a political stance that belies a naive faith in the party of Franklin Roosevelt to step in where other Democrats refused to tread.1 Walton’s story can’t be told without probing the relationship between democracy, the two-party system, and mass communication in the United States. Americans take pride in democratic self-government—even if they scorn politicians—and many believe it is one of the nation’s great exports, a gift to oppressed people denied the right to participate in fundamental decision-making. In the abstract, democratic rule empowers ordinary people; it subjects policies and platforms to voters for their inspection, approval, or rejection. When leaders fail their constituents, voters simply can go to the polls and throw the rascals out of ofﬁce, impressing on the new “ins” what their mandate is. In the United States the election process historically has been rooted in two major parties, competing in a winnertake-all battle for the loyalty and support of citizen voters. It’s not news to anyone that the two parties hover somewhere near the middle of the political landscape; nearly a century ago, Progressives dubbed the Republican and Democratic parties “Tweedle-dum” and “Tweedle-dee” because they seemed almost indistinguishable from one another. Given the responsibilities of citizenship and the persistent two-party structure, how are issues deﬁned, who deﬁnes them, and where do voters obtain insights into those issues on which they are supposed to make informed judgments? What are “the people’s” interests? Nowadays, during the ever-lengthening primary and campaign seasons, candidates and political commentators identify “hot button” issues, consultants and campaign advisors craft memorable slogans, and pollsters spew countless statistics thought to represent the pulse of the electorate. 1. For the two most important interpretations of this political shift, see Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln; and Sitkoff, New Deal for Blacks.

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Increasingly, marketing practices come into play as party committees decide where to invest their political dollars for the best return—as a resident of Indiana in the 2004 election, I saw very few advertisements for either presidential candidate and received no dinnertime telephone calls with feverish political pitches; because the Hoosier state is so solidly Republican, the Democrats saw no need to throw media money into a lost cause, and the Republicans assumed the state was safely in the fold of “red states.” This experience stood out to me as a change, but more a matter of degree than of kind. For mobilizing voters in general elections has for a long time depended upon channeling attention toward some issues and away from others. From the turn of the nineteenth century on, nationalists have depended upon print culture to give individuals a sense of belonging to an imagined community and a way of thinking about their interests. The makers of print culture include not only the great political thinkers and charismatic statesmen, but also those workers in the culture industry—many of them more or less anonymous—who make the editorial decisions about what will be available for citizens to read and consider. Walton was one of those culture workers in the 1920s and 1930s, guiding the Democratic Party in its effort to deﬁne Negro Americans’ interests. Looking at his work makes me conscious of the kinds of examples he disseminated and their origins and raises questions about their representativeness. Schooled in the most effective means of communicating through mass media, Walton crafted stories and arguments he knew ﬁrsthand— he didn’t dissemble—but once ensconced in campaign literature or talking points for party speakers they took on larger signiﬁcance as the issues up for debate. For those who cling to the belief that despite its ﬂaws the democratic system brings the most important concerns to the public square, Walton is an uncomfortable reminder of how carefully sculpted and manicured the public square can be. Walton’s involvement with the Democratic Party began almost casually. As he explained to Marguerite Cartwright in an interview for an article in the Negro History Bulletin in 1955, “I am not a life-long Democrat. Ferdinand Q. Morton, leader of the United Colored Democracy, requested me to write some political literature for his organization during a mayorality (sic) campaign.”2 The year was 1922, and Walton had just begun working full-time for the New York World. Those who knew Walton well would have known that his father-in-law, Fred R. Moore, was a staunch Republican, and that Walton himself was closely allied with Tuskegee, the late Booker

2. Marguerite Cartwright, “Lester A. Walton—Distinguished Democrat,” 12.

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T. Washington and his successor, Robert Russa Moton, and the National Negro Business League, all associated with the Republican Party. Morton’s request speaks more eloquently of Walton’s ability as a journalist and public relations expert than of Walton’s political position. Whatever Walton’s private views in 1922, he warmed to the task of writing on behalf of the Democrats in New York City. Opposition to the Democratic Party remained strong in 1922. Walton later recalled: “Our speakers were rotten-egged at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue and other points where we held meetings.” Nevertheless, when the ballots were counted on election day, “for the ﬁrst time in history, the majority of Harlem election districts went democratic.”3 As he explained the surprising outcome in a feature for the World, published a couple of weeks after the election, Negro voters resented the Republicans’ “base ingratitude” for their past support and were retaliating against Harding’s refusal to restore important patronage jobs lost under Wilson and the Democrats. But more signiﬁcantly, he ended his article by hailing a new moment in political life: “The day of racial solidarity in politics has past.”4 Walton was an astute political observer, and he had friends representing points all across the political spectrum, from Washington, Emmett Scott, Claude A. Barnett, and J. Finley Wilson on the Republican side to A. Philip Randolph in the Socialist camp. He knew the policy and programmatic differences that distinguished one from the other. But his work for the Democrats had not arisen from ideological afﬁnity. As Walton’s last sentence indicates, his principal objective was to divide the Negro vote so that it would be taken for granted by neither party. Later in his life, personal loyalty to and conﬁdence in Franklin Roosevelt made Walton a genuine partisan, but in the early 1920s, he was committed only to using his skills as a persuasive writer to draw a sufﬁcient number of Negro voters into the Democratic ranks to force political concessions from both major parties. A few months after the mayoral election of 1922, Walton prepared a feature for the World on the lively political atmosphere of Harlem, where “Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Communists, and I.W.W. enunciate their adopted political faith with unbridled fervor.” He insisted that all partisans agreed that the “treatment of the Negro in the South” was the “overwhelming domestic issue” to be addressed. “Lynching, disfranchisement and Jim Crowism are keenly felt and severely condemned,” he wrote. What divided the competing political groups was “how to bring 3. Walton to James A. Farley, March 4, 1939, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. 4. Lester A. Walton, “Negroes Soured by Republicans, Turn Democrats,” New York World, November 26, 1922, M-7, col. 1–3.

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about a betterment of conditions.”5 Although Walton did not take a stand atop a soapbox at the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, in his own quiet way, he, too, had entered the fray—using mass media and public relations techniques to make the divergent opinions expressed by African Americans pronounced enough to attract the attention of political leaders in the two major parties. Walton represented the Democrats to African American voters, and he represented the mood and desires of those same voters to white readers and party leaders. Both Walton’s political philosophy and his linking of mass media and politics had been developing since the turn of the twentieth century. One of Walton’s friends, J. Finley Wilson, remembered fondly election night in 1904, when he reminisced with Walton more than four decades later. He referred to a letter Walton had written to him and responded, “I am truly happy to know that you remembered the ‘Grand Old Days’ at the turn of the century,” and he listed some of the men with whom the two old friends had “listened to the returns.”6 I did not appreciate the full signiﬁcance of this letter until I read in the pages of the St. Louis Star how dramatically the returns were reported that night. The Star hung huge white sheets on various tall buildings at different points throughout the city and used stereopticons to project the latest political bulletins that came in across the wires. At a time before radio, St. Louisans could “hear” the returns after nine o’clock, when the Star began setting off colored “bombs” in the night sky to let people know who was leading. A red bomb indicated that Theodore Roosevelt was winning, a white bomb, his opponent. The explosion of a green bomb would mean that Joseph Folk was ahead in the race for governor; a rapid succession of red and green bombs showed that Cyrus Waldridge was ahead. Every half hour colorful explosions lit up the sky and sounded the “ﬁrst and latest news” of the election.7 The spectacle, the Roosevelt victory, and the company of friends made a lasting impression on Walton. He was one of thousands who thronged downtown St. Louis to get the latest vote count. A band outside of the new Star ofﬁces at Twelfth and Olive Streets kept enthusiasm high until midnight. I wonder if the group made its way at some point during the evening to the Rosebud Cafe, where two of its members, Sam Patterson and Louis Chauvin, were regulars, and where they might have heard a rousing rendition of The 5. Lester A. Walton, “Philosophy, Song and Romance Fill New Negro Babel,” New York World, April 1, 1923, S-4, col. 1–4. 6. Wilson to Walton, September 29, 1946, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 16/26. 7. “Star to Give All St. Louis Election News,” St. Louis Star, November 7, 1904, 11, col. 3–4; and “The Star Beat All Others in Giving News,” St. Louis Star, November 9, 1904, 7, col. 2.

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Strenuous Life, Scott Joplin’s syncopated tribute to T. R. After Roosevelt’s unprecedented dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House, there seemed to be good reason to remain loyal to the Republicans. Still, beneath the surface of jubilation, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction could be felt. For loyalty to one party or the other seemed to have little effect on matters of grave concern to African Americans. Throughout the 1890s, the number of African Americans lynched by white mobs reached staggering heights, and neither party took a ﬁrm stand against the practice. Southern legislatures found ever-more-ingenious ways to deprive African Americans of the right to vote—whether it was by imposing a poll tax they could not afford to pay or by creating “literacy” tests that few but jurists could pass. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the highest court in the land had sanctioned racial segregation, which nourished its evil twin, racial discrimination. It was in this hostile climate that an independent movement took shape in St. Louis. Although Walton remained in the party of Lincoln, some of his friends defected and lay the intellectual groundwork for the later political realignment that Walton helped engineer. One of the architects of the Independent Movement in St. Louis in 1898, J. Milton Turner, was one of Walton’s older friends in whose company he spent election night in 1904. Turner had served as U.S. minister to Liberia during the Grant and Hayes administrations, but sometime after his return to the United States in 1878, he announced his support for the Democratic Party. He became one of the most prominent Negro Democrats in the state over the next couple of decades. In 1898, however, Turner began pushing for political independence. Loyalty to the Democrats had not paid off in signiﬁcant social change, but a reﬂexive return to the Republicans didn’t offer much greater hope. Indeed, Turner blasted Negro Republicans for accepting low-paying patronage jobs in exchange for uncritical support of the party. Turner urged black St. Louisans to adopt an independent political stance, let themselves be courted by both parties, then choose the party that promised best to serve them. After the turn of the twentieth century, a younger generation of African American political leaders in St. Louis, including George Vashon, built on Turner’s Independent Movement and articulated positive reasons for turning to the Democrats. Vashon and other Negro Democrats regarded the “Civil War and chattel slavery” to be history, not part of their memory, and they resented the Republican Party for assuming it owned the black vote, for “befooling their fathers,” and for engaging in political corruption. In 1893, the Negro World had moved to St. Louis from Minneapolis and had offered class-based reasons for joining the Democrats. In the wake of its appearance in St. Louis, African Americans in the city formed the

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Greeley Negro Democratic Club and the Jefferson Club, and increasing numbers of votes from black precincts went to the Democratic Party. In a ﬁery speech delivered at a rally in 1901, a representative of this generation of Negro Democrats in St. Louis argued: “The black man’s natural political place is in the Democratic Party as the two great parties have aligned themselves on industrial issues. As an aristocrat, the Negro has not a leg to stand on. ‘Equal rights to all; special privilege to none’ means his salvation. Whether or not the Negroes remain in the Democratic Party here in St. Louis, however, depends altogether on the attitude of the party toward them.”8 The speaker was willing to give Democrats a chance to live up to their slogan in the hope that the promise of black votes would elicit a Democratic platform sensitive to their interests. By 1904, however, Negro Democrats had become frustrated with the white party structure, and even J. Milton Turner had returned to the Republican fold.9 For African Americans the years between Roosevelt’s election in 1904 and the 1922 New York mayoral race were marked by disappointment and political betrayal. Roosevelt proved no great friend to African Americans and went out of his way to regain the support of white southern leaders who were outraged by his dinner with Washington.10 Extrapolitical activities, like the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the staging of black performances to growing white audiences, became social and cultural outlets for African Americans’ frustration with American “democracy.” Woodrow Wilson’s segregationist policies, the world war in which African American valor was the nation’s best-kept secret, and a series of wartime and postwar race riots were enough to disillusion even the rosiest optimist. The only alternative to suffering in silence was seeking retaliation—organizing local political rebellions that would catch one party or the other off guard. As Walton put it in 1923, “In the matter of politics, New York Negroes have found they can advance their political and civic status by voting in large numbers the Democratic ticket. In another community, Negroes ﬁnd that their interests are best conserved by throwing much of their strength to the Republican Party.”11 But it was also clear that neither 8. The quoted passage is from a speech at a Democratic rally in 1901. George Vashon was one of the prominent participants, but it is not clear that this passage can be attributed to him. For a full account of the rally, see “Progress of Negroes in Their Efforts to Free Themselves from Republicans,” St. Louis Republic, August 4, 1901, 8, col. 4–7. 9. “Colored Club Issues Ukase to Democrats,” St. Louis Star, October 19, 1904, 1, col. 1; and “Read and Think,” St. Louis Palladium, October 1, 1904, 8, col. 3. 10. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, 63–64. 11. Walton, “Negroes Soured by Republicans,” New York World, col. 3.

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political party had done much to protect African Americans from violent racism and routine injustice. Cheered by the success of the campaign in 1922, Walton rejoined Ferdinand Q. Morton in 1924 to direct publicity for the United Colored Democracy, and for the next three presidential election years, he placed his talents at the disposal of the party. What a task he had before him! The logic of independence had to do battle with deeply ingrained suspicion of the party of slavery, night riding, and Woodrow Wilson. Walton had to craft arguments that would present Democratic candidates as feasible options for Negro voters. Moreover, to do so required facts, ﬁgures, and speciﬁc examples that were persuasive. In an era before political consulting ﬁrms planned the details of campaigns and before widespread use of opinion polls identiﬁed “hot button” issues among the electorate, political parties relied on personal knowledge gained from more informal networks of communication. Walton’s involvement in Democratic Party campaign strategy exempliﬁes the early-twentieth-century process by which mass media came to play an ever-larger role in deﬁning key issues. As a journalist, Walton routinely gathered information that he used in feature stories and which he ﬁled away for use during elections. In the 1920s, Walton’s attack was focused on planting the idea that African Americans could vote (and had voted) for either major party. In 1928, on the eve of the election, Walton described for New York World readers the African American’s trip to the ballot box as “another epochal migration”—this time a political rather than an economic or social one. “Seldom does a political observer forecast the possible results of a Northern or border state these days that he does not consider the Negro an important element in the equation,” he wrote. He predicted that nearly half of the black voters in the East and Midwest would cast their ballots for Al Smith.12 Walton also turned the anti-Catholic opposition to Smith on itself, suggesting that intolerance of religious choice was little different from racial discrimination. But in the heyday of probusiness Republican administrations, such arguments largely fell on deaf ears. Even New York State voted overwhelmingly in favor of Herbert Hoover and just barely elected Franklin Roosevelt for governor.13 Walton hailed the election of an 12. Lester A. Walton, “Great Negro Vote May Go to Smith,” New York World, November 4, 1928, 5. col. 1. 13. I am relying here on Walton’s memory of the election, which he shared in a statement prepared in 1945 at the time of Roosevelt’s death. See “Tribute of the HONORABLE LESTER A. WALTON, American Minister to Liberia, delivered at the Memorial Service held for the late PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT at Monrovia, Liberia, Sunday, April 29, 1945, 2,” in CABPA, box 188, folder 2.

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African American, Oscar De Priest, to Congress representing a district in Chicago and attributed the victory to the migration of blacks from the South, to their success in business, and to the race’s determination to “stage a comeback of the colored Congressman,” an obvious reference to Reconstruction-era representation by African Americans.14 Nevertheless, it was within months of Hoover’s inauguration that Walton began amassing evidence for the next election. In April 1929, the World sent Walton to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a city founded, governed, and inhabited by African Americans, to collect material for some feature stories. Two stories appeared in the World based on this trip. One was about the town’s decision to do away with the jail and another was on the Republican Party in Mississippi awarding patronage jobs to white Democrats instead of the African Americans who constituted the majority of the party’s ranks. Privately, Walton wrote Claude Barnett that he had learned from Mary Booze (a daughter of Mound Bayou’s founder, Isaiah T. Montgomery, and an active Republican) that Hoover had promised to reward her for her loyalty to the party, but as soon as he was in ofﬁce, he supported the placement of “a rabid Negro hater” in the position in her stead.15 In 1932, Walton made Hoover’s “lily white” stance a major feature of the campaign. In a piece for the Crisis, Walton urged African Americans to vote for Roosevelt because Hoover couldn’t explain “why he sponsors Lily-Whitism.” And a pamphlet called “To Colored Voters,” revealed not only the “Lily White Program” in the South, but also Hoover’s refusal to “recognize Black committee men and women in the party.”16 Mary Booze’s experience became, in a sense, representative of all black Republican experience. Similarly, Walton parlayed his coverage of the Negro Gold Star Mothers’ trip to Europe into political fodder in the midterm election of 1930 as well as the 1932 presidential election. Mothers whose sons had died in the Great War and been buried in European cemeteries were sent by the government to visit the graves of their fallen sons. African American women,

14. Lester A. Walton, “Negroes Pleased to Get Seat in Congress,” New York World, November 18, 1928, E-12, col. 4–5. 15. Lester A. Walton, “Town Run by Negroes Does Away with Jail,” New York World, April 28, 1929, E-14, col. 4–7; and Lester A. Walton, “Mississippi Shies at Another White Party,” New York World, May 5, 1929, E-16, col. 4–8. For the information on Hoover’s double-cross, see Walton to Barnett, April 20, 1929, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927–1934. In the same letter to Barnett, Walton indicates that he had written an article for Moore, so his trip for the World also yielded material for the Age. 16. Lester A. Walton, “Vote for Roosevelt,” Crisis 39 (November 1932): 343–44; and “To Colored Voters,” 6, in Arthur W. Mitchell Papers, Chicago Historical Society (hereinafter AWMPA), box 1, ﬁle 7.

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however, were sent on passenger freighters while white mothers traveled on passenger liners like the George Washington. Walton’s feature in the New York World made much of “Harlem leaders [who] waxed caustic in criticism of the Federal Government for ‘Jim Crowing’ Negro womanhood on the pilgrimage to the graves of loved ones who fought and died to help make the world safe for democracy.”17 A little more than four months later, Walton used nearly the same language to explain why Negroes snubbed Republican candidates in the midterm elections: “Throughout the campaign opposition speakers played upon the emotion of audiences by reciting the policy of the United States Government in ‘Jim Crowing’ Negro Gold Star Mothers sent overseas to visit the graves of their sons who died to make the world safe for democracy.”18 In 1932, as publicity director for the Democrats, Walton reminded black voters once again that Hoover had “Jim Crowed” Negro mothers two years earlier, arguing that Hoover was, in essence, a “traitor” to the party of Lincoln, because the Great Emancipator “would have heeded the fervent protests of colored Americans and countermanded the order of the War Department, which . . . ‘Jim Crowed’” Gold Star Mothers.19 On a more positive note, Walton, who had become a true supporter of Roosevelt by 1932 (not merely a rebellious Republican), played up FDR’s blood ties to Theodore Roosevelt, which he may have thought would sway some older black voters. He also reported in the World when two “Negro Justices,” James Watson and Charles Toney, assumed ofﬁce on January 1, 1931, an event that Walton described as “a big step forward in the march of progress.”20 In the 1932 campaign, he attributed the elections of Watson and Toney to Roosevelt’s leadership as governor. In his piece for the Crisis, Walton argued that FDR had “given Negroes more recognition and opportunities” than had Republicans, and he mentioned as well that each of the judges was earning $12,000 a year in his position.21 The same information was included in the pamphlet, “To Colored Voters,” but there it

17. Lester A. Walton, “Negro Gold Star Mothers Resent Racial Distinction,” New York World, July 20, 1930, E-3, col. 5–6. 18. Lester A. Walton, “Negroes Helped in Republican Overthrow,” New York World, November 23, 1930, E-6, col. 5–8. 19. “To Colored Voters,” 5–6. A similar argument was part of another pamphlet with a similar title, “To the Colored Voter,” in FDRPA, Vertical ﬁle, Campaign Literature, 1940, Dem. Colored Division. Despite the ﬁle name, this pamphlet was distributed in the 1932 election, because it identiﬁes Hoover as the Republican candidate. 20. Lester A. Walton, “Negro Justices Soon Take Ofﬁce,” New York World, November 16, 1930, E-5, col. 2. 21. Walton, “Vote for Roosevelt,” 344.

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was also contrasted with Hoover’s nomination of Judge Parker to the United States Supreme Court, a man who openly opposed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.22 But Walton’s role in promoting the election of the two judges remained hidden. Among his papers is a copy of material sent to him by James Watson on behalf of the Citizens’ Committee. Attached to the material is a note from Walton with recommendations on layout, the organization of information, and the number of names to be included—changes he suggested be made before it went to press.23 This particular instance exposes the blurry boundary between political spin and objective journalism. In spite of his decade of service to the Democratic Party, Walton’s appointment as publicity director in 1932 was not guaranteed. More and more capable African American professionals were turning to the Democrats for opportunities and were vying aggressively for positions in the party that might be rewarded in the event of a Democratic victory. Walton’s angling for the position of publicity director took on greater urgency in late 1931, when he was in desperate need of full-time employment after the World’s presses went silent. He worked for a short time at the New York Herald Tribune, produced a special anniversary issue of the Tuskegee Messenger, continued doing public relations work for Firestone and the National Negro Business League, and returned as managing editor of the New York Age.24 Walton worked on a couple of private ventures in 1931, collaborating with Charlie Belle to launch a new race magazine and booking engagements for W. C. Handy.25 But eventually his network of inﬂuential white friends in journalism and philanthropy came to his rescue. Herbert Bayard Swope wrote Walton early in 1932, “I think there may be something you can do politically.” Swope urged Walton to get in touch with one of his former colleagues at the World, Charles Michelson, who was working with the Democratic National Committee in Washington, and

22. “To Colored Voters,” 5. 23. The literature and Walton’s recommendations are in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 16/17. 24. Irving Dilliard, “Lester Aglar Walton,” Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 7, 767. A couple of letters indicate that Walton was at work in Tuskegee in 1931: Gladys Walton to Lester Walton, June 6, 1931, LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 9; and Joe Canavan, secretary to lieutenant governor, New York, to Walton, November 5, 1931, in LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 4. 25. Walton and Belle got so far as a layout for a magazine to be called “Rhythm,” and the layout reveals the proposed contents of the magazine—music, stage, radio, and screen “From the Far East to the Golden West.” The sketches, dated June 1932, are in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 2. Two letters point to Walton’s booking efforts on behalf of Handy: Walton to Charles O. Heydt, April 2, 1932; and Walton to S. L. Rothafel, April 1, 1932, both in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 5.

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promised, “I shall keep you in mind, in the hope that something of a favorable nature will turn up. In the meanwhile, keep up your courage.”26 In June, Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Fund wrote George Foster Peabody, “I believe that Mr. Walton could be of extraordinary help to the Democratic Committee, ﬁrst because he is honest and dependable, and second, because he has real journalistic ability. I am wondering if it will be possible for you to write to some of the Democratic leaders, suggesting that Mr. Walton’s services be secured.”27 In September, Walton sent a jubilant telegram to Claude Barnett: “Made publicity director colored division third successive time stop this years appointment assumed political signiﬁcance due to numerous applicants and backing stop I was endorsed by John F Curry Tammany Hall leader and was strongly favored by Vann Rainey and Johnson stop writing later please send out release.”28 When the dust of the election settled, Democrats agreed that the campaign among Negro voters had been a grand success. African American Democrats were resolved to solidify the inroads they had made into the party. Walton wrote Barnett after the election that the traditional (white) party leaders were “planning some great things” and that he, Robert Vann, Julian Rainey, William J. Thompkins, and Joseph L. Johnson intended “to do some worth-while organizing.”29 In January, Negro Democrats met in Chicago with sympathetic white party leaders, where Walton (misidentiﬁed as Lester J. Walton), Vann, Rainey, Johnson, Thompkins, and Percy D. Jones were the honored guests at a banquet. The purpose of the meeting and banquet, as Congressman Arthur Mitchell saw it, was “to make out a working program for the Negro in the new administration.”30 The “program” included the creation of special administrative units devoted to Negro affairs staffed by African Americans. Joseph Johnson, for example, served in the Interior Department’s Ofﬁce of the Advisor on Negro Affairs,

26. Swope to Walton, January 11, 1932, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 8. 27. Jones sent Walton a copy of the letter he had written on his behalf; see Jones to Peabody, June 21, 1932, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 16/8. In the full text of the letter it is apparent that Walton had appealed to Jones for help, but no copy of this letter is extant in Walton’s papers. 28. Walton to Barnett, September 24, 1932, Western Union, in CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927–1934. 29. Walton to Barnett, November 14, 1932, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927– 1934. 30. The quoted material is from the following letter, Mitchell to John W. Bussey, November 25, 1932, AWMPA, box 1, ﬁle 7. Mitchell discussed strategy for the meeting and banquet with Robert Vann, urging him to do most of the talking in front of the white leaders, but allowing that Lester Walton should also be given a chance to speak during their hearing. See Mitchell to Vann, December 31, 1932, AWMPA, box 1, ﬁle 7.

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and Robert Vann served as a special assistant to the attorney general. Thompkins, of course, took over the ofﬁce of the Recorder of Deeds, and Walton went off to Liberia to represent the United States as minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary. Beyond these key party activists, African Americans were appointed by Roosevelt to positions in the Departments of Justice, Labor, Treasury, Commerce, and the Interior, and they staffed ofﬁces in many of the “alphabet soup” agencies created by FDR to revitalize the depressed economy. Walton used these appointments as ammunition in subsequent Democratic campaigns that targeted Negro voters.31 Although it’s doubtful that bureaus and political appointments were uppermost in the minds of most African American voters, they became both issues and talking points blacks were encouraged to think of as representing their interests. Although Walton never again worked as publicity director for the Democrats, he continued to work behind the scenes to help shape the manner in which the party was represented to Negro voters. His archives are full of notes, quickly dashed off, with ideas for the campaign and with cryptic references to his involvement with the Speakers’ Bureau. In 1936, no longer the anonymous voice of the party, Walton is quoted in campaign literature praising the Roosevelt administration for “the treatment accorded Haiti and the Virgin Islands,” the “beneﬁts that have come” to the Negro citizen, and the “program which is remaking America into a better place for all the people” and in which “the Negro has a real place.”32 A stack of press releases includes one about Walton’s return to the United States from Liberia, material sent out by the national campaign committee to keep Negro Democrats in the news, and articles on Walton appeared in such papers as the New York Sun, the New York Age, the St. Louis PostDispatch, and the Chicago Defender.33 More profound than a handful of speaking engagements and quotable quotes for press releases and campaign literature was Walton’s impact on the overall strategy of the party. Indeed, in some ways these public appearances obscure the ways that Walton was calling the shots and in the 31. “Why the Colored Citizen Should Help Re-Elect President Roosevelt November 5th, 1940,” FDRPA, Vertical ﬁle, Campaign Literature, 1940, Democratic Colored Division. 32. “Take Your Choice,” 5, CAPBA, box 341, ﬁle 1. 33. “Lester A. Walton Returns to U.S.: U.S. Minister to Liberia on Vacation Here with His Family,” New York Age, September 5, 1936,1, col. 4; “Lester A. Walton Speaks,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 19, 1936; “Liberian Envoy Here on Visit; Talks to Group,” Chicago Defender, October 1936; and “Who’s News Today,” New York Sun, July 3, 1936, all in LAWPA, box 15, green scrapbook, which contains clippings on Walton’s public life in the 1930s and 1940s.

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process participating fully in the business of political consulting. His imaginative approach reached Negro voters directly and kept the campaign focused. While distributing campaign materials at Democratic rallies was one way to get the message to those voters receptive to the Democrats’ message, Walton was interested in reaching those who were in the Republican camp. He urged the Democratic National Committee director of publicity, Charles Michelson, to place materials at Negro expositions held around the country, to distribute Roosevelt buttons on the streets of Harlem, and to establish a prize for the best essay on “Why the Willkie Campaign Is Bogging Down,” as ways of reaching ordinary citizens who might not attend political rallies.34 He also recommended that the party hire writers to send letters to the editors of Republican newspapers in order to get the Democratic perspective in organs that otherwise would exclude that point of view.35 During the 1940 campaign, Walton wrote Paul C. Aiken at Democratic National Committee headquarters with a list of Republican critiques that speakers be instructed to address before black audiences along with what they should say about each one. Among these was the Republican accusation that Roosevelt had failed to pass an antilynching bill; Walton instructed speakers to point out that McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover also had failed to pass such a law, even though they often had Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate.36 Moreover, not only did Walton handpick speakers for the Speakers’ Bureau in 1936 and 1940, but he also recommended that particularly effective speeches be printed as pamphlets.37 As a journalist, Walton had always taken care to get speciﬁc statistical information to support his claims about the ﬁnancial well-being of African American institutions or organizations and about the impact of particular policies on black communities and individuals. This conﬁdence in numbers carried over into his work in politics. In 1940 and 1944, for example, he

34. Walton to Charles Michelson, August 22, 1940; Walton to Michelson, August 23, 1940; Walton to Michelson, September 6, 1940; Michelson to Walton, May 21, 1940; and Edward L. Roddan to Walton, June 10, 1940, all in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. 35. Walton to Charles Michelson, July 24, 1940, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. 36. Walton to Paul C. Aiken, October 17, 1940, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. 37. In a letter from Walton to Claude A. Barnett, Walton writes, “Have been asked to correlate Speakers’ list for National Campaign and then a list of speakers in various states who will be our ‘second string.’ Cooperating directly with Speaker’s Bureau at Biltmore.” See Walton to Barnett, September 14, 1936, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938. See also Walton to McKee, September 4, 1940, seeking the speaking services of Crystal Byrd; and Michelson to Walton, August 2, 1940, in which he informs Walton that the DNC plans to print Senator Byrnes’s speech as a pamphlet as per Walton’s suggestion; both letters are in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4.

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gathered statistical information that later appeared in campaign literature aimed at Negro voters.38 Walton’s work was premised on the assumption that “facts” were more persuasive than lofty political pronouncements. Walton himself believed fervently in interracial cooperation, but as a political actor, he prioritized what he thought African American voters would want to know: how many Negroes had been assisted by the Roosevelt administration; who had been appointed to signiﬁcant ofﬁces; and how much the government had actually spent on programs to improve the living conditions of black voters. In mid-August 1940, President Roosevelt asked his secretary, Edwin Watson, to arrange a meeting with Walton. The meeting was a response to a letter the diplomat had sent him about the upcoming Democratic national convention, where FDR expected to make an unprecedented bid for a third term in ofﬁce. Walton had offered the president some unsolicited advice on how to focus the campaign—namely, he urged FDR to remind voters in his acceptance speech that he had “saved the nation’s ﬁnancial structure” and had tried “one experiment after another until achievement of ultimate success.” Walton felt that FDR should take credit for “saving the patient” instead of criticism for not trying “different methods.”39 The U.S. minister to Liberia also offered his services in any capacity FDR might see ﬁt to use them. Whether bemused by Walton’s presumption or genuinely convinced that Walton could be of use, Roosevelt decided to put Walton in charge of an announcement of great importance to African American citizens. The two men met on September 12, and within days, Walton wrote Charles Michelson at the Democratic National Committee headquarters: “At the request of the President I called at the White House Thursday morning. I have learned that it is to be the policy of the War Department to put only 10 per cent of Negro selectees in labor battalions, and that the Negro is to receive a 10 per cent representation in various combat units. I have sent news releases to the Negro press in which I pass on the information without disclosing source of same.”40 In relatively short order, African American newspapers car-

38. For information used in the campaign, see Walton to Charles E. Hall, November 4, 1939, LAWPA, box 10, ﬁle 10 (Hall was a specialist in Negro statistics in the Bureau of the Census); and Walton to Gen. Edwin M. Watson, July 20, 1944, FDRPA, box 6, folder colored matters. The fruits of this gathering of numerical data can be seen in Let’s Follow Thru and Why the Colored Citizen Should Help Re-Elect President Roosevelt in FDRPA, Vertical ﬁle, Campaign Literature, 1940, Democratic Colored Division. 39. Walton to Roosevelt, August 19, 1940, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. 40. Walton to Charles Michelson, September 15, 1940, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4.

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ried the story, and Walton instructed party speakers to include this piece of information in the last months of the election season.41 Roosevelt’s announcement was a timely piece of good news for a publicity wizard like Walton, who knew that Negro voters continued to doubt the Democratic Party’s commitment to improving race relations even though they trusted and admired the president and ﬁrst lady. Walton had warned James Farley in early 1939 that if Roosevelt was not nominated to run for a third term, he was not sure how African Americans would vote. As Walton saw it, support for FDR in 1932 was “a protest vote”; in 1936, African Americans were still “not voting as democrats but as ardent followers of President and Mrs. Roosevelt”; but in 1940, if the Democrats nominated someone besides FDR to lead the party, a Republican candidate, making the right kind of appeal, could garner a large share of the black vote.42 Walton had stuck with Roosevelt even though he had some doubts about the president’s commitment to African American rights and had followed George Foster Peabody’s advice not to pressure FDR, Colonel Howe, or James Farley to take on large race questions before they had had a chance to carry out “a ‘new deal’ for all the people, forgotten men of every color.”43 But, as I’ve indicated elsewhere, Walton was widely regarded as the key strategist for dealing with issues pertaining to Negro voters.44 As a cool professional, Walton knew that his job was to persuade African Americans to buy Democratic Party politics; as an African American, Walton seems to have recognized that the issues he identiﬁed were not the only ones and perhaps not even the most important ones among the concerns of African American voters. Given the nature of political campaigning, so much of it engineered by professional culture workers, it’s understandable why Walton, like the vast majority of his white counterparts, is not a household name. But how in the world has Walton escaped the attention of political historians

41. Clippings of the following articles were sent by Walton to the president’s ofﬁce: “Labor Troops Not to Exceed Ten Percent, Walton Is Assured,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 21, 1940; “War Dept. to Use 10 Per Cent of Negroes in All Combat Units,” New York Age, September 21, 1940; and “Roosevelt and Walton in Confab: Minister to Liberia Discusses Conscription of Negroes,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 21, 1940; all in FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. For instructions to speakers in the Speakers’ Bureau, see Walton to Paul C. Aiken, October 17, 1940, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4. 42. Walton to James A. Farley, May 24, 1939, LAWPA, box 10, ﬁle 7. 43. George Foster Peabody to Walton, April 18, 1933, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 3. 44. Paul C. Aiken to Daniel Wolcott, October 10, 1940, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 4.

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who’ve charted the realignment of the African American vote from the Republican to the Democratic Party? I decided to embark on an experiment to ﬁnd an answer. One of the archives containing collections devoted to the Colored Democrats in these years is in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and Archives in Hyde Park, New York; when I entered it, I asked the archivist on duty how the card catalogs are organized instead of using the electronic catalog and ﬁnding aids, for I wanted to replicate the investigative experience of the 1960s through the early 1980s when important historical research on the so-called Roosevelt coalition had been conducted. The collection is separated into ofﬁce, presidential, and personal ﬁles. I checked all three and requested all the materials indicated for “Colored Democrats.” I found numerous pamphlets from the elections of 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. I read dozens of letters and memos written by organizers and participants. Neither the pamphlets nor the letters could be attributed to Walton. The only mark of his involvement is a tiny heading on some of the stationery indicating that Lester A. Walton was director of publicity—none of the letters even alluded to him. I then returned to the three card catalogs, looked up “Lester Walton,” and requested all material related to him. It was there that I found some of the press releases, the memos, the discussion of the Speakers’ Bureau, and the directive to send all questions related to the black vote through Walton. The exclusion of Walton’s activity from the narrative of African American political history is, in part, an accident of the archives. The creators of this archive—the president and his ofﬁce staff—organized ﬁles for everyday use, and they knew where to look for Walton. The scholar, by contrast, has ﬁrst to know of Walton’s signiﬁcance, because otherwise he’s essentially a tiny name on stationery that includes many tiny names with bigger-sounding titles; he or she wouldn’t ﬁnd Walton unless looking speciﬁcally for him. I then read two memoirs by James A. Farley, whom Walton considered both a friend and a political ally. Walton had looked to Farley repeatedly for support in his endeavors, from his bid to become U.S. minister to Liberia to his 1950s search for politically signiﬁcant work. Writing from Monrovia in 1939, Walton offered detailed advice on strategy for Roosevelt’s unprecedented quest for a third term. I wonder if he knew that Farley was planning to run for the Democratic nomination or that the relationship between Farley and FDR had cooled considerably from the 1936 campaign. Shortly before Farley made public his political ambitions and his break with FDR, he published a memoir to substantiate his claim to being the real power behind the Roosevelt throne. He failed in his bid for the Democratic nomination, and a decade later, Farley penned a second

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memoir offering the inside story of depression-era politics.45 As important as Farley was to Walton, the U.S. minister apparently was of no consequence to the postmaster general; I searched in vain for a single reference to Walton, to the realignment of black voters’ loyalties, or to the contribution of the Colored Democrats to the party’s overall success in the 1930s and 1940s. As former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Farley had a chance to tell this story—twice—and his narrative could have alerted both contemporaries and later generations to the changing complexion of the Democratic Party. Farley, however, kept his own counsel; Walton and other black Democrats remained in the shadows. There’s one additional reason for Walton’s disappearance, and it is revealed in the Roosevelt archives once Walton is found. It’s one that has to do with deciding what’s important and who makes that call. It exposes the limits of African American participation in public relations, and it occurred at the crossroads of the New Deal and the impending war. Walton had proved valuable to the Democratic Party in the 1930s, Farley’s stony silence notwithstanding. And he had developed a real commitment to Roosevelt. By 1940, Walton reserved his frustration for moments when he thought the Roosevelt administration had not explained its position as effectively as it could have. A case in point was the administration’s response to A. Philip Randolph’s threatened march on Washington in 1941 to protest racial discrimination in war industries. Walton had been instructed (he did not say by whom) to ﬁnd out how the president’s Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) was perceived by African Americans. In mid-1942, when the FEPC was transferred from the War Production Board to the War Manpower Commission, Walton wrote Roosevelt that “So general have been criticisms that I undertook to make a personal inquiry of the situation last week while in Washington.” He admitted that he “found some justiﬁcation for the charge that the Committee has not had ample opportunity as an organized entity, ‘to carry on its receipt, investigation and redress of complaints of discrimination.’” Walton urged FDR to clarify the matter in a public announcement.46 Roosevelt assured Walton that an understanding had been reached and that the FEPC had funds sufﬁcient to “fully discharge its duties” in “dealing with all phases of discrimination under Exec. Order #8802.”

45. James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots: The Personal History of a Politician; and James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story: The Roosevelt Years . 46. Walton to Roosevelt, October 22, 1942, FDRPA, OF 4245G, box 3, folder Ofﬁce of Production Management, August–December 1942.

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Intraofﬁce memoranda, however, indicate that FDR had sent Walton’s letter of concern to Paul McNutt at the FEPC with instructions to “prepare reply for my sig.” and that the president’s request had spurred the agencies to work out “an understanding.”47 In late November, a couple of weeks after he received FDR’s reply, Walton sent the president an article from the New York Age that reported that “Negroes had watched with growing anxiety the complete emasculation” of the FEPC, and he recommended once again that the president make “an ofﬁcial statement to the press [to] clarify the misunderstanding.”48 Roosevelt never issued such a statement. Indeed, the archives reveal that Walton’s letter never reached FDR. In a memo attached to Walton’s letter and enclosures, someone identiﬁed only by the initials “ld” asks General Edwin Watson, “Do you want this to go to the President?” Over his initials, Watson scrawled “No” and off to the side underscored the word “File.”49 The president unknowingly missed an opportunity to express to African American citizens his awareness of and concern for their plight. As a single event, this one can be explained away as the work of a dutiful secretary protecting one of the most powerful men in the world from a minor matter at a time of national crisis. Having looked at only a tiny fraction of the letters, memoranda, and newspaper clippings sent to Roosevelt—and only those pertaining to race relations—I can imagine how overwhelmed the president’s ofﬁce staff might have felt, having to decide which of the hundreds of missives that arrived each day should come to FDR’s attention. But that same explanation rests on the assumption that racial justice as an issue was not as important as others facing the nation and its leaders and that it was not worth the time to recycle Roosevelt’s letter to Walton as a press release to calm the “anxieties” expressed in the Age article. And although it was a single event, it was not singular. It is part of an intricate pattern that blocked Walton, as an African American individual, and, more generally, black citizens from the representative center.

47. The letter sent by FDR to Walton on November 11, 1942, was not kept in the presidential ﬁles nor is it in Walton’s archives, but Roosevelt’s ofﬁce kept cross-referenced memoranda tracking correspondence and actions taken on speciﬁc matters. For a detailed chronology of this exchange, see FDRPA, PPF 7286, box 7257–7288, document heading Walton, Hon. Lester A., New York, NY, October 22, 1942. 48. The clipping, “Randolph Serves Notice Negroes Will Fight Stripping of FEPC; Plan for Protest March Revived,” New York Age, November 28, 1942, is ﬁled with a letter from Walton to Gen. Edwin M. Watson, November 28, 1942, in FDRPA, OF 4245G, box 3, folder Ofﬁce of Production Management, August–December 1942. 49. ld to General Watson, December 2, 1942, FDRPA, OF 4245G, folder Ofﬁce of Production Management, August–December 1942.

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Walton later attributed his cool relations with the Truman administration and his more-or-less forced resignation to simmering resentments in the FEPC. But he never commented on his appraisal of that ill will. As I sit here, trying to ﬁnish this story about Walton’s part in representing the Democratic Party, I feel yet another ghostly chill. Another advisor, another situation, and Walton might be remembered as the public relations genius who staved off a domestic crisis by recognizing the need to explain policy clearly and simply to citizens. But here, it seems that Walton “forgot his place”; he presumed to pressure white people on behalf of African Americans instead of the other way around. Walton was behaving rationally in the belief that his skills in the dissemination of information would lead to the goal that “everyone” strove to reach—interracial understanding and a “‘new deal’ for all people, forgotten men of every color.” Wartime rhetoric of democracy collided with the reality of persistent racism in the United States, and as the years passed, people like Walton—unpleasant reminders of that collision—were better off marginalized and forgotten.

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Walton insisted at all times that he be known as the U.S. minister to Liberia, not the Negro minister.1 As he understood his charge, he was to represent the interests and the people of the United States in a foreign land, and his race should not be a matter of comment. Walton did all that he could to represent the land of his birth with dignity and a touch of elegance. When Walton climbed aboard the George Washington in the summer of 1935, he was about to become the face of America in Monrovia. He was the stand-in for a people whose historical and current interests had created the conditions for the existence and ongoing challenges of the Republic of Liberia. Although Monrovia was not the most prestigious post, and the state of the nation was fragile, Walton was proud of his new position and optimistic about the work he could do there. Walton visited his mother in St. Louis before departing, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a feature on his appointment.2 A photographic portrait of Walton adorned the front cover of the Crisis.3 The Waltons landed in England, where they spent two weeks interrupted by a short trip to Paris, before sailing on to Monrovia. 1. For a reference to this issue early in Walton’s tenure see Walton to Harry A. McBride, June 12, 1936, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. 2. “St. Louis Negro New Minister to Liberia,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 7, 1935, clipping from the Collections of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association. 3. Crisis 42 (October 1935): front cover. For a brief story about the new minister, see 293.

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The Walton family on the way to Liberia. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

I could sense the excitement Walton felt when I read a letter he wrote to his friend Claude Barnett. The heading reads “Splendid Hotel” Paris, and in the letter Walton told Barnett that he, Gladys, and the girls “have been immensely enjoying our stay in Europe.” He wrote nothing about the sights they had seen, their activities, or the people whom they had met. He focused instead on the treatment he had received at the hands of career diplomats in both London and Paris. “Every consideration has been shown me as American diplomatic ofﬁcer by American Embassy at London and the consulate there,” he wrote in clipped journalese. “Embassy here also has been cooperative and most courteous. Upon arriving in London from boat train we

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were met at station by a representative from Embassy, a chauffeur in livery with car, also truck for our baggage. A representative has called at hotel in London each day to transact whatever business I deemed necessary.” Knowing that Barnett, a fellow journalist, was likely to develop a news story out of the details Walton shared in the letter, the minister gave him explicit instructions: “I do not want you to publish all this. However, I think it would be helpful if some reference were made to the marked courtesy accorded me and family by Embassies and consulate.”4 I sensed that some of Walton’s ebullience stemmed from the fact that he could report equal treatment, not just that he had experienced it. For part of the pride he felt in representing the United States in Liberia came from the opportunity he had to represent in the press an instance (with luck, many more instances) of racial equality. Because I read Walton’s correspondence with Barnett before I read his reports to and correspondence with State Department ofﬁcials, I began to realize that his role as U.S. minister to Liberia meant something more than speaking on behalf of his government, negotiating and signing treaties, and carrying out the routine work of a diplomat. He was trying simultaneously to describe and to live in the kind of world he wanted to exist—a world where interracial cooperation would improve the quality of life for everyone. On the eve of his departure from New York, Walton told a reporter for the Herald Tribune, “I hope to be a conciliator and to bring all groups together,” and the New York Age reported more fully that Walton “is sincerely devoted to interracial cooperation” and “is vitally conscious of the rights of all peoples and never fails to appeal for every opportunity and every right necessary to the development of the colored people.”5 And that suggested to me that even though Walton resented being called the Negro minister to Liberia, being an African American mattered. Being a citizen of the United States mattered, too. And Walton was determined to enjoy the culture, comforts, and foods he and his family were accustomed to at home. Some of the evidence for the Waltons’ efforts to bring an American way of life to Liberia surfaced in an unexpected corner of his archives—a section devoted to ﬁnances, where he kept an interesting and odd assortment of shipping orders, catalogs, and receipts that provide a record of the items he and his wife thought were essential to setting up household. Among the ﬁrst purchases was an RCA radio set to get programs daily from the United States; within a couple of years, he upgraded 4. Walton to Barnett, September 15, 1935, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935– 1938. 5. “Walton to Seek Conciliation of Liberian Groups,” New York Herald Tribune, July 4, 1935, and “U.S. Minister to Liberia,” New York Age, July 13, 1935, both in LAWPA, box 15, green scrapbook, 5 and 10, respectively.

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to a combination radio/record player and ordered a generator so he could listen to broadcasts after 1:00 a.m., when Monrovia’s power plant shut down. Walton placed an order with the National Biscuit Company for boxes of animal crackers, butter wafers, saltines, and vanilla wafers, and to Campbell’s for cases of soup. He went through Francis H. Leggett and Company to obtain cases of canned goods—beans, peas, pears, peaches, boneless skinless sardines, and red salmon. He ordered Listerine from K. Steckham’s U.S. Trading Company in Monrovia, which touted itself as the “Distributors for Leading American Manufactures.” He had stopped by Hawes Brothers, Tailors in London on one of his Atlantic crossings and had measurements taken so that later he could order suits. In 1938, he shipped over his Studebaker, and when word came that appropriations had been made for a new legation, Walton asked that the plans for the building include a garage large enough to house the new car. In anticipation of the new building, Gladys Walton shipped bed linens, towels, and pillows from New York, and the State Department sent all new furnishings to replace the dowdy furniture that had greeted the Waltons on their arrival.6 These familiar goods really could not replicate the quality of life the Waltons enjoyed in New York. There they lived in the Dunbar Apartments surrounded by celebrated performers, activists, writers, and businessmen. Walton had lunched frequently with Du Bois at Lüchow’s, a distinguished German restaurant, and judging from some of the banquet menus he saved over the course of his life, he was no stranger to haute cuisine. In Monrovia it was a struggle to get fresh meat and vegetables, because food kept at the capital’s refrigeration plant was stolen, and fresh fruits and vegetables were available only in season. Indeed, the Waltons maintained a ﬂock of chickens for poultry products.7 Walton’s health actually suffered 6. On the RCA radio, see Walton to Claude Barnett, November 26, 1935, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938; Walton to C. K. Moses (of RCA), May 16, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. May 1938; and Walton to Howard Fyfe (U.S. despatch agent), August 13, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 8/1938. On foods see Walton to Howard Fyfe, September 27, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 9/1938; Francis H. Leggett and Company to Walton, May 15, 1939, and June 20, 1939, both in LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 5/1939 (disregard the discrepancy between the second letter and the ﬁle label). The Listerine order appears in K. Steckham to Walton, September 13, 1939, LAWPA, box 10, ﬁle 7. For the order of two white suits and two “Palm Beach” suits, see Hawes Brothers to Walton, November 30, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 11/1938. The information about the Studebaker, linens, and furnishings for the house are in Walton to Clifton R. Wharton, April 26, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle 3–4/1938. 7. Walton to T. J. R. Faulkner (in charge of the refrigeration plant), October 15, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 9/1938 (disregard the seeming discrepancy); Ruth J. Embree to Walton, June 24, 1939, offers chickens at nine pence each to add to the Walton ﬂock, LAWPA, box 10, ﬁle 2.

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during his tenure in Monrovia, and he knew that diet played an important role. As he put it to his personal physician, Dr. Savory, “It is impossible for me to get often lamb chops, liver and many things [Dr. Haiman] recommended. Mrs. Walton and I brought with us several hundred dollars worth of supplies, mostly canned stuff. We get our meats once a month from Liverpool and besides spend a goodly sum monthly at the local stores here. Nevertheless, Monrovia is not New York when it comes to being in a position to purchase what you want.”8 Until Walton introduced them, American ﬁlms never appeared in Liberia, and once they did, they sparked local dissatisfaction with goods available in the country. In a 1942 interview for the People’s Voice, Gladys Walton insisted that since the ﬁrst moving pictures arrived in 1938, Liberian women tried to copy American fashions and hair styles.9 At the same time, in a country where the standard of living was considerably lower than in America, the Waltons’ expectations were high. When locals stole his lamb and beef from the local refrigeration plant, swiped the Colt .45 that he and his wife kept in their bedroom, and hurled stones at his Studebaker as it swept through the Firestone plantations, they merely expressed simmering resentments at the U.S. minister’s presence as the representative of an imperious, if not exactly imperial, United States. Walton’s appointment was a gem, valuable and multifaceted, each surface reﬂecting the light of a different commitment. After four years of underemployment and mounting ﬁnancial worries, Walton earned in 1935 one of the highest salaries of any African American public servant— $10,000 a year plus housing and travel and expense accounts. He told the Herald Tribune reporter that his Mother “has been my inspiration,” and privately, he may well have rejoiced that once again he had lived up to his role as “the bread winner” in his family, which his Mother had enjoined him to do four years earlier. He certainly saved her letter, which read in part, “Son, you have reached your goal. I am pleased.”10 Walton no longer needed “smoke money” from Nannie, and his youngest sister, Lucille Walton Garrett, who had expressed concern for her brother when he couldn’t ﬁnd a suitable position—“I pray for you each nite”—reported 8. Walton to Dr. Savory, August 9, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle August 1938. 9. “Monrovia to Have Its First Talkies August 11–12 at College of West Africa,” Weekly Mirror, August 5, 1938, 1, in LAWPA, box 15, green scrapbook, 89; “Liberia Needs ‘Mickey Mouse’,” Says U.S. Envoy,” New York Herald Tribune, February 27, 1938, LAWPA, box 15, green scrapbook, 69; and “Gladys Walton Tells How to Keep House in Liberia,” People’s Voice, March 7, 1942, LAWPA, box 15, black scrapbook. 10. “Walton to Seek Conciliation of Liberian Groups”; Mama to Walton, July 4, 1931, LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 8; and Mama to Walton, July 30, 1935, LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 9.

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that although she had just written Nan a letter in pencil, “I couldn’t write to the Minister of Liberia with a pencil. Ha! Ha!”11 No matter what else might happen, in the eyes of his family, Walton had made it. Another facet of Walton’s position sparkled with the hope of preserving the national autonomy of the Republic of Liberia. In the 1930s, as violence exploded in East Asia, North Africa, and Central Europe, Liberia trembled at the likely possibility that she, too, would fall prey to one (or more) of the land- and power-hungry fascist powers in the West. The greatest fear among Liberian leaders was that Germany would succeed in persuading other European powers that the African republic would be better off as a mandate of the Reich, stripped of its independence and governed by a wealthier caretaker regime.12 After Italy overran Abyssinia in 1936, leaving Liberia as the sole independent nation on the African continent governed by Africans, fear crescendoed into panic. Walton and others interested in Liberia registered that panic and resolved “to keep this one spot in all Africa left from aggression by European powers.”13 As the ofﬁcial representative of the United States in Liberia, Walton believed that he would be extending the American commitment to democracy by marshalling his nation’s resources to maintain Liberian sovereignty. Preserving Liberia’s autonomy was a worthy goal in its own right, but Walton saw this aspect of his new position in the light of another of its facets—the chance to instill transnational racial awareness and solidarity. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself at this point, because this kind of representation—crafting an image of Liberian achievement for the African American press—was a major aim somewhat independent of his

11. Nan to Les, March 3, 1931; Babens to Les, July 1932; and Babens to Walton, September 5, 1935, all in LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 9. 12. Walton to Claude Barnett, June 4, 1934, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton 1927– 1934; and Walton to secretary of state, April 7, 1937, NARA, 882.00/1054. Walton also alerted the State Department to the possibility of Polish and/or French designs on Liberia. See Walton to secretary of state, June 14, 1937, NARA, 882.00/1058. For an explanation of the “mandate system” that links it to the immediate post–World War I negotiations regarding the disposition of German colonial holdings, see David Hunter Miller, “The Origin of the Mandates System,” 277–89. For the impact on Africa of Article 22 of the Versailles Treaty, which outlined the terms of mandates, see Raymond Leslie Buell, “The Struggle in Africa,” 22–40. 13. Walton to Thomas Jesse Jones, June 1, 1936, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. For other examples of Walton’s assertion of his commitment to Liberian autonomy see Walton to Claude Barnett, June 1, 1936, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938; Walton to Harry A. McBride, May 4, 1936, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6; Walton to McBride, June 1, 1936, NARA, 882.00/1034½, and “Liberia Shall Bloom Under U.S. Government,” African Morning Post, October 19, 1935, in LAWPA, box 15, green scrapbook, 25, which quotes Walton.

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ofﬁcial duties and deserving of separate scrutiny. Sufﬁce it to say at this point that Walton represented Liberia, ofﬁcially and unofﬁcially, even as he served as U.S. minister to the republic. As a professional newsman, convinced of the power of mass media to cultivate consciousness, Walton saw his appointment as a grand opportunity to place before Western readers “word pictures” of Liberia with which most would be unfamiliar. He wanted to acknowledge Liberian success and initiative instead of perpetuating a view of the republic as incompetently ruled and socially chaotic. As the ﬁrst diplomat to restore U.S.-Liberian contact after a brief hiatus in relations, Walton also valued the possibility of insinuating his business philosophy into the policy-making process of a country that had, practically from the beginning, struggled to remain solvent. He had transmitted this philosophy to African American entertainers on the pages of the New York Age in the ﬁrst couple of decades of the century, and for several years he had been in charge of public relations for the National Negro Business League. At the World, Walton used his features as a rostrum from which he would preach the message of ﬁscal responsibility, which included sound investments, prudent savings, and cautious economic expansion. Now he was charged by his government to assist and advise the president of Liberia to get the vulnerable country on solid economic ground. Walton’s good business sense seems to have been one of the deciding factors in his appointment. J. H. Dillard, a southern educator involved in the interracial movement, wrote Undersecretary of State Phillips in 1933, urging the State Department to appoint Walton to the position. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “much of our attempted help has gone astray, and I believe that Lester Walton, with his clear head and unselﬁsh disposition, would do much toward getting matters into better shape.” When the appointment was ﬁnally announced in July 1935, a New York Times editorial touted Walton as “a colored man of real ability and strong character” with an “intimate acquaintance with educational, social and economic movements” that would serve him well in Africa. Little did Times readers know that this “editorial” was cribbed word for word from a press release written by Thomas Jesse Jones in May 1935, a couple of months before FDR actually signed the commission.14

14. Dillard to Phillips, June 2, 1933, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 3; Dillard is on the list of individuals who ofﬁcially endorsed Walton that can be found in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938; and “Liberia,” New York Times, July 21, 1935, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 20. For Jones’s press release, see “ANNOUNCEMENT of LESTER A. WALTON as man for LIBERIAN JOB, by Thomas Jesse Jones,” May 19, 1935, in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938.

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In fact, given how little Walton’s service to the nation is remembered in the authoritative annals of the twentieth century, it might surprise many people to learn that prominent white ﬁgures like Harvey S. Firestone, Anson Phelps-Stokes, George Foster Peabody, and Senator Robert F. Wagner, as well as inﬂuential African Americans like Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Bishop Reverdy C. Ransom, and Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, publicly pushed for his appointment and behind the scenes buttonholed key individuals in the Roosevelt administration to select Walton for this job. When all was said and done, however, Walton’s principal reason for being in Monrovia was to advance and protect the interests of the United States. He never lost sight of that mission. No one, including the career diplomats in the State Department, realized in 1935 how vital that post would become as nations around the world careened toward war. Initially, the U.S. minister to Liberia pursued two main objectives—conclude treaties that would establish formal relations between the two nations and facilitate commercial development that would beneﬁt Firestone Tire and Rubber Company as well as produce revenues to stabilize the Liberian economy. Before Walton could begin any work, he had to present his credentials to Edwin Barclay, who was ﬁnishing the term of Charles D. B. King as president of Liberia. In a public ceremony on October 16, 1935, Walton called the moment “the beginning of a new era” and pledged to “develop and cement [relations] on terms of mutual regard and good will.”15 About one month later, Walton wrote Claude Barnett conﬁdentially that he and Barclay had, in fact, become quite friendly: “I ‘drop’ in my car and go to Executive Mansion or his farm nearby when the occasion demands, and he calls after hours at the Legation.” The Waltons and Barclays planned to spend Thanksgiving day at the U.S. legation, and the two men were working closely to negotiate a peaceful solution to the latest Kru uprising.16 Every month, Walton prepared reports for the State Department outlining conditions in Liberia, for which—as a responsible journalist—he conducted interviews and independent research. With Barclay’s inauguration set for January 1936, little in the way of new initiatives originated before the ten-day celebration took place. Walton preserved the memory of the gala events of the inauguration in a photograph collection that documented the inaugural ceremony (and his own participation in top hat and 15. Walton’s Opening Address, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938. 16. Walton to Barnett, November 26, 1935, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935– 1938. It was Walton who underscored “conﬁdentially,” and he ended the same missive with double lines under the words “conﬁdential again.”

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The Walton family dressed for the inauguration of Edwin Barclay, president of Liberia, 1936. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

tails), the “droves” of people from the hinterland who came to the capital for “Native Day,” and the “temporary thatch-roof pavilion” that served as the site of the formal reception. The Waltons hosted the ﬁrst state dinner held at the legation in many a year.17 With the new administration in place and the new minister ﬁnally settled in, the affairs of state commenced. The wheels of international relations moved very slowly for the ﬁrst couple of years of Walton’s tenure. The Barclay administration placed highest priority on getting the country’s ﬁnancial and political situation under control and worked with Walton in piecemeal fashion to regularize ties between the United States and Liberia. Barclay, no doubt with Walton’s full support and encouragement, instituted economy measures (including a 15 percent reduction in salaries for those employed by the central government) to demonstrate his commitment to ﬁnancial solvency. By the end of Barclay’s ﬁrst year in ofﬁce, Liberia showed a surplus in revenue for the ﬁrst time in a long time. Walton prepared a press release that 17. Walton to Claude Barnett, January 20, 1936, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938; and LAWPC, box 3, #11,306 (Edwin Barclay); box 1, ﬁle Marjorie and Gladys Odile Walton, #11,300 (“Vai Belles attending inauguration”); box 1, ﬁle Lester and Gladys Walton and daughters, #11,191 and #11,216 (the Waltons dressed for the inauguration).

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described Liberian progress for the year in terms of the largest budget since 1928, a 33.5 percent increase in revenues, new allocations for road construction, education, and sanitation, and legislation designed to prevent exploitation of native groups by “dishonest ofﬁcials” representing the central government.18 Meanwhile, Walton began negotiations for three treaties that would shortly prove crucial to the continued sovereignty of Liberia and to the U.S. war effort in the 1940s, but they all took months to conclude. For every issue under discussion, Walton cabled the State Department for permission to concede this or that point or to hold ﬁrm on the U.S. position as he understood it from his brieﬁng in Washington. The ﬁrst was not signed until November 1937, and the third almost a year after that. The extradition treaty, signed in 1937, allowed both countries the right to extradite “fugitives from justice” who ﬂed to the other nation. According to the ﬁnal document, it promoted “the cause of justice,” but just as important, it placed Liberia and the U.S. on equal footing, each seeking cooperation from the other in the effort to maintain domestic social order.19 The Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation treaty set the stage for increased travel and trade between the two nations. It was signed in 1938, before war exploded in central Europe, and signaled to the rest of the world the renewed American commitment to friendly relations—perhaps even a special relationship—with the republic.20 When the successful negotiations were made public, the State Department announced that this historic agreement superseded an 1863 treaty by adding provisions for entry, travel, and residence in either country as well as “most-favored-nation treatment in customs.” Privately, R. Walton Moore congratulated Walton “upon the skillful manner in which you conducted these negotiations.”21 Although signed several months after the Friendship treaty, the Consular Convention agreement was ratiﬁed at the same time and spelled out what consular ofﬁcers could and could not do in the “territory of the other country.”22 By the time Walton signed the last of these treaties, more good news ﬂowed from Liberia’s central government. The budget was balanced, 18. Walton to Claude Barnett, January 9, 1937, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938. 19. Extradition Treaty between the United States of America and Liberia (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1940), 1. Walton’s copy is in LAWPA, box 14, ﬁle 6. 20. Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation Treaty between the United States of America and Liberia (Washington: United States Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1940), 1. 21. Press release on treaty, August 9, 1938, NARA, 711.822/23; congratulations in R. Walton Moore to Walton, August 13, 1938, NARA, 711.822/20. 22. Consular Convention between the United States of America and Liberia (Washington: United States Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1940), 1, LAWPA, box 14, ﬁle 6.

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revenues on the rise, and appropriations for public improvements increased by 22 percent over those made in 1937. The Barclay administration had more than doubled the budgets for road building and education and had increased allocations for sanitation and radio communication by 72 percent and 88 percent, respectively. Thanks to the cooperation of the Liberian government, Firestone continued to expand its operation on the enormous lease.23 Walton was busy on the economic front from the beginning of his stay in Monrovia. In late 1935, before Barclay’s inauguration, Walton wrote Harry A. McBride in Washington about two issues he thought were crucial to the interests of both Liberia and the United States. He pushed for more regular service from the Barber Line Company to improve communication, which would, in turn, facilitate the development of Liberian business activity. Walton recognized how irregular means of communication and transportation damaged the chances for success of those hoping to engage in international trade. He also informed McBride of pending labor legislation in Liberia that would increase the minimum wage, and the company most directly affected would be the Firestone plantation. Instead of trying to persuade President Barclay to put the brakes on such a move, Walton asked McBride to ﬁnd someone to speak with Harvey Firestone and convince him voluntarily to raise wages as soon as feasible and before the new labor law was passed. Since Firestone would eventually be bound by law to pay his workers more, Walton thought he could strengthen his position among Liberians by avoiding the appearance of being coerced into paying decent wages.24 In January 1936, Walton arranged with Claude Barnett, Harvey Firestone, and Herbert Bayard Swope to have a newsreel made that featured both Barclay’s inauguration and an aerial view of the Firestone operations and that could be distributed “to colored [movie] houses throughout the country,” as a way to encourage awareness of and investment in the economy of the African republic.25 In February, Harvey S. Firestone, his wife, and his brother Roger paid a visit to Monrovia, where Walton took part in negotiations between Firestone and the Liberian government that were “conducted on the friendliest terms.” According to Walton, both parties believed that the relationship was “the best in years.”26 By spring 1937, Walton reported to 23. Press release, February 9, 1938, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938. 24. Walton to McBride, November 26, 1935, NARA, 882.00/1046. 25. Walton to Claude Barnett, January 20, 1936, in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938. 26. Walton to Barnett, March 3, 1936, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938.

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Secretary of State Cordell Hull that the Firestone plantations had yielded a half million pounds of rubber in the last year, making it “the largest single rubber development in the world.” The progress being made in Liberia prompted Firestone to cultivate rice on part of the land he leased to feed his workers and to build a second rubber preparation factory, which would offer additional employment to Liberians.27 With the formal announcement of the three treaties and the upswing in the Liberian economy came a ﬂood of praise for the work of the U.S. minister. Thomas Jesse Jones, the education director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, recognized that Walton “[held] a very difﬁcult position,” attending to the needs and interests of all concerned, and enjoined him to “continue to have the wisdom, the patience, the humility and the devotion to understand the divergences, to see the good in both sides, to work for the reconciliation of differences and to bring about a state of mutual respect and conﬁdence that will understand all forms of prejudice and suspicion.”28 Bishop Ransom congratulated Walton on his “success as the representative of our government, as well as of our race, in the honorable position you are ﬁlling with distinction.”29 Walter Walker wrote the U.S. minister from his post in the Liberian consulate in the United States, “I have heard so many good things that you have accomplished since your arrival in Monrovia, until I do not know just where to begin in handing out compliments to you.” Walker couldn’t decide whether to call Walton’s term as minister the “treaty administration” or the “era of accomplishment.” Similar comments poured in from colleagues in the State Department to interested friends and longtime associates. Walton savored every indication that he was doing a great job in a difﬁcult situation.30 Then war became a reality, and the mission in Liberia took on a new coloration. Months before the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, high ofﬁcials in the State Department identiﬁed Liberia as crucial to U.S. security should the Nazis’ aggressive land grabs of the year before escalate into a transatlantic war. Were Monrovia to fall into the hands of the Germans, the Axis powers would have an ideal location for airbases that could serve as takeoff points for westbound ﬂights to the Americas. And at the same time, the U.S. air force and navy would lack a suitable base of operations from which attacks against Germany and her allies could be 27. Walton to secretary of state, April 28, 1937, NARA, 882.00/1055. 28. Thomas Jesse Jones to Walton, September 27, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 8/1939 (this is an instance of a misﬁled letter). 29. Reverdy C. Ransom to Walton, December 10, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 12/1938. 30. Walker to Walton, December 29, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 12/1938.

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launched—should it come to that. When war came, both the United States and Liberia assumed a neutral stance, their citizens hoping to avoid involvement in the conﬂict and their leaders leaving the door open for supporting Great Britain and France. In the United States, FDR’s advisors did not think the time was ripe for abandoning the principles of the Monroe Doctrine by exerting inﬂuence outside of the western hemisphere; in Liberia, ofﬁcials recognized that they needed a powerful ally to save them from Ethiopia’s or Dakar’s fate, but they could get neither a promise of assistance from America nor the green light to negotiate with France or Great Britain for defense.31 It was in this context of uncertainty that plans took shape for building ﬁrst an airbase and then a port facility in Liberia near the capital. Liberia’s secretary of state, C. L. Simpson, believed that the United States could justify establishing bases far from home by pointing to “modern developments in naval warfare and air transportation” that would likely interfere with American trade and communication even if she remained neutral. He maintained years later that “It may well be that this was the ﬁrst diplomatic move in support of an idea which has become so characteristic of American strategic and political thought in the post-war world.”32 Simpson’s claim is a bit exaggerated and in fact ignores the groundwork that had already been laid. Walton had negotiated an Air Navigation Arrangement in June 1939 that established rules governing air trafﬁc between the two governments.33 Perhaps unknown to both Walton and Simpson, a month earlier Henry S. Villard had begun discussing with colleagues in Washington the strategic importance of Liberia in securing a Brazil-to-West Africa air route.34 Before President Barclay presented the idea of an airbase to Admiral David M. Le Breton, who, as commander of the USS Omaha, stopped in Monrovia in October 1940 as a show of U.S. support for Liberia, Walton had produced a two-page memo entitled “The Importance of American Air Terminals in Liberia,” which he sent directly to FDR in mid-September. Walton opened his memorandum forcefully: “In view of Germany and Italy’s recent military and economic penetration of spheres of inﬂuence in Africa, and Germany’s bloodless invasion of Dakar, capital of Senegal, Liberia is becoming more and more of particular interest to the United 31. Beecher, “The Second World War,” 393; C. L. Simpson, The Memoirs of C. L. Simpson, 208–13. 32. Simpson, Memoirs, 212–13. 33. Air Navigation Arrangement between the United States of America and Liberia (Washington: United States Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1940), LAWPA, box 14, ﬁle 6. 34. Beecher, “The Second World War,” 393.

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States.” He pointed out the distance in miles separating Monrovia from Natal, Brazil, and noted German activities in Dakar that posed a “threat in commercial competition” and that were “pregnant with military implications.” He reminded the president as well of Spain’s efforts to extract a concession from Liberia for setting up an “aviation camp,” an effort that had been trumped by the recently signed aviation agreement. Roosevelt sent the report to the secretaries of state, war, and the navy and to the Civil Aeronautics Board.35 From my angle of vision as a biographer of Walton, the treaties, the completion of a new legation and airﬁeld, and the minister’s able reports placed him at the center of the action. Maybe it’s because I read Walton’s papers and his detailed correspondence with Claude Barnett ﬁrst, and those documents prepared me to see Walton as a diplomatic force. The eye of a diplomatic historian, however, is not so focused on one person. Instead, the event or policy in question requires a different kind of research—one that de-centers any single individual’s role and that follows the trail of dispatches, memoranda, and instructions wherever they might lead. The diplomatic historian ultimately weighs the inﬂuence of various individuals involved in a process and may deem one or a handful of people as the key player(s). In the end the sight of both the biographer and the diplomatic historian is occluded by archival remains. Both kinds of scholars are on a quest, but they rely on witnesses that emerge in the course of research—witnesses who have a limited view or who want to protect their own reputations and legacies or who are driven by motives that are neither openly articulated nor readily apparent. As I peer over the shoulders of diplomatic historians at the intricate web of correspondence cited in their footnotes, I see a curious pattern. Between 1940 and 1943, when interest in Liberia was at its height, references to Walton are far outnumbered by references to career diplomats in Washington and heads of state—Welles to Roosevelt, Murray to Welles, Roosevelt to Churchill, Stimson to Hull, and so on. Walton’s reports supplied information on which policy decisions made by others could be based; his signature on treaties legitimized agreements. But it is less clear how close State Department ofﬁcials allowed Walton to come to the inner circle. There is no doubt that Walton fully grasped Liberia’s strategic signiﬁcance. In October 1940, he 35. The Importance of American Air Terminals in Liberia, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 8; Roosevelt to Walton, September 27, 1940, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936– 1942. The letter thanks Walton for his memo submitted on September 14, 1940. Also in this folder, see Edwin M. Watson to Walton, September 6, 1940, which sets an appointment for a meeting to be held between Walton and Roosevelt on September 12, 1940. It is likely that Walton’s report was written as a result of that meeting.

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P. L. Sadler, commanding general of colored American forces in Liberia, and Lester A. Walton, U.S. minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary to Liberia, reviewing troops. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

requested permission to travel from New York to Monrovia on a U.S. cruiser to “enable air, navy, and war experts to proceed on the cruiser and make a careful study of Liberia and the West African Coast.”36 In May 1941, Walton sent Secretary of State Hull “a word picture” of conditions in Liberia as important background material given the “republic’s strategic geographic importance as an air and naval base.”37 And shortly after the U.S. entered the war, Walton wrote directly to FDR: 36. Walton to General Watson, October 3, 1940, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. 37. Walton to Cordell Hull, May 22, 1941, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 16.

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In the light of the recent torpedoing of British vessels in close proximity to Liberian waters, may I suggest that immediate steps be taken to provide adequate protection for American vessels calling at Liberia and other West African ports. . . . The sinking of one American vessel carrying materials for the construction of barracks and foodstuffs for troops in Liberia would be an untimely and serious loss. Moreover, as Liberia is one of our remaining sources of rubber supply, the question of making a determined effort to insure the delivery of rubber consignments is of paramount importance.38

Walton outlined for Hull and Assistant Secretary of State Berle the need for U.S. aid to Liberia to help develop its commercial and economic potential in ways that would redound to the beneﬁt of both the U.S. and Liberia in the postwar world.39 In these crucial years, Liberia represented the best link in transatlantic transportation, a key site for facilitating the delivery of Lend-Lease aircraft, the sole reliable source of natural rubber, and eventually, an important station for American troops, and Walton knew as much about the country’s history, government, social problems, and commercial potential as anyone. Yet, the more visible Liberia became in wartime planning, the more invisible Walton became. It was precisely at that moment that Harry McBride and Sumner Welles wanted to push the U.S. minister out of his post—a moment we need to revisit. In February 1942, Welles wrote President Roosevelt that “Colonel McBride strongly recommends that an unusually forceful and thoroughly experienced career Foreign Service Ofﬁcer should be placed in charge of our Legation in Monrovia for the duration of the war.” He concluded the letter by adding “that while the Department is fully appreciative of Mr. Walton’s commendable record of service in Liberia, it concurs in Colonel McBride’s recommendations as in the best interests of the United States at this time.”40 At this point Walton’s “commendable record of service” had lasted seven years, during which period Walton had established cordial relations with Liberian ofﬁcials, smoothed interactions between Firestone and the central government, and had taken the initiative to learn about the administration of hinterland regions and people, the plants and minerals with

38. Walton to Roosevelt, March 21, 1942, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. 39. Walton to Hull, May 22, 1941, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 16; Walton to Berle, October 12, 1943, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. 40. Welles to Roosevelt, February 26, 1942, FDRPA, OF 1644, folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942.

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commercial potential, and the local conditions most likely to hinder both Liberian and U.S. interests. Since neither McBride nor Welles explained what “unusually forceful” and “thoroughly experienced” meant in terms of concrete attributes, it is difﬁcult to understand what they thought Walton lacked. Roosevelt’s response to Welles’s recommendation, read in the vacuum of biographical research, looked like heartening evidence of his conﬁdence in Walton. In a one-sentence memorandum, the president asked, “If we were to do this, what would you do in regard to keeping Mr. Lester A. Walton in the State Department?”41 Moreover, at no point during Roosevelt’s remaining years in ofﬁce did he relieve Walton of his duties as U.S. minister to Liberia. But FDR’s archives hints at a subtle change—ofﬁce ﬁles pertaining to Walton are divided at 1942. And as I studied the pattern woven by the lines of communication among the career Foreign Service ofﬁcers, FDR’s conﬁdence in Walton begins to change shape. He gives Walton a “special assignment” to study African American morale. He asks Walton to report his ﬁndings directly to Assistant Secretary of State Berle. He approves a months-long leave-of-absence for Walton to carry out the task of surveying black communities, conducting interviews with key black leaders in the nation’s main urban centers, and making recommendations for a course of action that will address the concerns uncovered during the course of his investigation. Roosevelt found a way to remove Walton from the circuit of decision making and to siphon his energy and involvement away from Liberia and into U.S. race relations. Walton never knew that his eagerness to serve the president, his nation, and the men and women of African descent would result in his own erasure. But while he toiled ardently on his special assignment, others took over the serious work in Liberia, and his ﬁnal report to Berle, which led to no action, made Walton persona non grata to members of the Black Cabinet when the worker charged with mimeographing the report slipped it to them. Not knowing that the political switchmen had sidetracked him while the career ofﬁcers chugged ahead with conﬁdence in one another, Walton continued to advise the State Department as if his contributions were valued. While the War Department wanted access to Liberia for strategic military purposes, the “architects of globalism” were looking beyond the war to an economic order that would serve the interests of the United States.42 Walton’s erstwhile boss, Adolf Berle, took special interest in Liberia. In the 41. Roosevelt to Welles, February 27, 1942, FDRPA, OF 1644, Folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. 42. Patrick J. Hearden, The Architects of Globalism.

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midst of the war, Berle pressured the U.S. Treasury Department to assume the cost of converting Liberia’s currency from British pounds to American dollars. He also began developing a plan that would draw from public and private ﬁnancial resources to spark Liberian economic development.43 Walton shared Berle’s vision, but he felt that the assistant secretary of state had been inadequately informed of the challenges that lay before a plan to tap the commercial potential of the African republic. He wrote Berle in October 1943 “to give, as I see it, a factual picture of the situation with respect to the immediate procurement of Liberian commodities through the joint efforts of our Federal and private agencies. In my opinion, there must be a radical change if our economic objectives are to be attained.” Walton’s “criticism of the present modus operandi” centered upon the lack of awareness among U.S. businessmen and federal ofﬁcials of the actual conditions in Liberia and those groups’ unwillingness to inform themselves properly when they visited the country. Transportation networks, while slowly being developed, could not handle the kind of commercial trafﬁc U.S. investors envisioned; warehouses for stockpiling goods simply did not exist. Moreover, because government and corporate representatives looked for easy contacts in Monrovia, they made deals with foreign traders rather than with Liberian companies, a move that undermined the goal of developing the Liberian economy.44 Walton was trying to help the State Department see that Liberia’s lush forests, wild rubber plants, palm kernels and oil, and unexplored mineral wealth were not simply there for the taking. Perhaps his realistic portrayal of the land, people, and system of barter in the hinterland dampened Berle’s high hopes, but that was not the U.S. minister’s intention. For in spite of one diplomatic historian’s dismissal of Walton’s “characteristic disregard for Liberian sovereignty,” the U.S. minister did not want development of Liberia to fail because investors didn’t understand the situation, and he certainly never gave up his commitment to protecting the nation’s sovereignty.45 He also thought he was serving his own country faithfully and well. In October 1944, Walton contacted Berle again, this time asking for his support for upgrading the position in Monrovia from U.S. minister to ambassador. He argued that the change would be consistent with the U.S. plan to make all missions abroad into embassies after the war, and he felt that

43. Beecher, “The Second World War,” 396–97. 44. Walton to Berle, October 12, 1943, FDRPA, OF 1644, Folder Walton, Lester A., 1936–1942. 45. Beecher, “The Second World War,” 410.

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it would give a status to Liberia in keeping with the “important projects” being launched there. Finally, the promotion of Walton to the rank of ambassador would be “a deserving recognition” of his “ten years of service as Chief of Mission.” Paul Alling, acting chief of near eastern affairs, and Jonathan Daniels looked “with favor on the idea,” Walton reported. He concluded by expressing his willingness to assume the new rank at the current salary.46 The decision to upgrade the position did not come until after Walton retired in 1946. Failing to be promoted to ambassador, however, was the least of Walton’s problems. After eleven years as U.S. minister to Liberia, Walton stepped down in the midst of controversy. Enthusiasm for the construction of a port facility in Monrovia, a port once considered important by both the Department of State and the Department of War, waned as soon as the United States no longer needed its base in Africa to distribute equipment and arms to allies. Disagreements over the location and ﬁnancing of the harbor facility contributed to delays in construction, which further prompted U.S. military and postwar planners to turn their attention elsewhere. Indeed, by the time Walton returned to the United States, the harbor was still unusable.47 A series of labor strikes erupted in late 1945, which not only further delayed progress on the harbor but also added to the cost of its completion. Walton helped negotiate a settlement that granted workers a 25 percent increase in wages.48 Reports on the unrest reached the United States in greatly exaggerated form—Liberia was “on the verge of anarchy,” and a U.S. battleship had been ordered to sail to the port “to restore order.” The rumors dogged Walton upon his return to the United States in early March 1946. He told a reporter for the Chicago Defender that he had “no information as to how such a rumor got started” and insisted that “it is ﬁctitious.”49 In spite of the troubles that had been broadcast and the implication that Walton was somehow responsible for their getting out of hand, various State Department ofﬁcials wrote Walton to commend him for his long and

46. Walton to Berle, October 31, 1944, LAWPA, box 11, ﬁle 10. 47. Beecher, “The Second World War,” 404–5. 48. Ofﬁce of the Strike Committee to the Works Manager, R. C. P. Coy, December 15, 1945, LAWPA, box 13, ﬁle 3; Walton to Byron H. Larabee, manager at Firestone, January 2, 1946; and Walton to C. C. Huitt, January 4, 1946, both in LAWPA, box 13, ﬁle 4. 49. “Unrest in Liberia Greatly Exaggerated, Walton Says,” a newspaper clipping (neither the name of the newspaper nor the date of publication is indicated). “Firestone Workers in Liberia Get First Raise in 20 Years,” Chicago Defender, March 23, 1946, clipping, along with the article above, in LAWPA, box 23, ﬁle 2.

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effective record of service in Liberia, excerpts of which appeared in the newspaper accounts of his return.50 Sometimes biographers see more than they want to see—betrayals by friends, a subject wounded and squirming in humiliation, and forces that transcend individual merit and personal ﬂaws. All of these surfaced as I traced the end of Walton’s tenure as the ofﬁcial U.S. representative in Liberia. But I had to see the details and to dig for clues that would help me understand why Walton ended up on the margins of the story of U.S.– Liberia relations in these crucial years of world war and postwar economic development. I was struck—and pained—by the way the mass media representations of Walton ultimately rendered him less rather than more visible and memorable. Walton, who had devoted so much of his energy to representing African Americans in a positive light appeared in the press as an incompetent failure. This negative image began to take shape about a year before Walton resigned. While conferring with President Tubman one day, Walton learned that rumors were circulating in the United States that President Truman had accepted his resignation, information that was news to Walton. Representatives of the Negro Newspaper Publishers’ Association had been sent on a tour of Liberia by President Roosevelt, and they had returned with shocking accounts of the conditions and abhorrent administrative practices in Liberia. Henry S. Villard, chief of the Division of African Affairs, admonished Walton to “be prepared to take into full account the strong opinions brought back to the United States by persons of this type” and “to adopt a ﬁrmer attitude with regard to Liberia and the reforms so badly needed in that country.”51 Within a few months, stories ﬁltered back to Monrovia, and the Weekly Mirror, the mouthpiece of the central government, published an article in August 1945 that indicated that Walton had been removed from ofﬁce because he supported former Liberian president Edwin Barclay’s oppressive policies toward natives in the country’s interior. The article cites Mary McLeod Bethune as a source for inside knowledge that Walton was to be replaced by “another more qualiﬁed and vigorous leader, who will not ‘go along’ silently with the dictatorial set-up in Liberia.”52

50. Henry S. Villard to Walton, January 29, 1946; and James Clement Dunn to Walton, January 31, 1946, both in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 20. 51. Henry S. Villard to Walton, April 14, 1945, LAWPA, box 11, ﬁle 7. 52. Alfred E. Smith, “Lester Walton Recalled: GI Howl on Liberia Ousted Diplomat,” Weekly Mirror, August 17, 1945, 1, col. 1.

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I did not ﬁnd a copy of the Weekly Mirror article among Walton’s papers. I found it ﬁled among the papers of his supposed friend and collaborator in Chicago, Claude A. Barnett. Nestled among the other clippings and documents in the ﬁle is a press release distributed by Barnett’s powerful Associated Negro Press. The denunciation of Walton in the Monrovian weekly had come essentially word for word from Barnett.53 Walton spent much of the summer of 1945 trying to defend himself to his superiors in Washington. His pride wounded, his soul bled onto ofﬁcial missives to his colleagues in the State Department. To James Clement Dunn he wrote, “The rumors aﬂoat here have been very embarrassing to me. . . . After having for ten years faithfully, and I am told very creditably, served as the American Minister at this post I think I am deserving of better treatment.”54 To Henry S. Villard, Walton poured out his anguish: It is not conducive to one’s mental equilibrium to be asked when you are leaving the country, why do you have to leave; to calm the anxieties of your house help, who have heard the rumor; to serve as chairman of the Baptist Hospital Board of Management, knowing that the fellow board members are wondering just how long you will be with them; to be unable to settle arguments as to the correctness of the rumor, when the only information you have received was from Liberian ofﬁcials; and moreover, the perturbation occasioned among your dear ones at home, who, too, are unable to say yea or nay.

Walton blamed his current predicament partly on the events of 1942, when word of his special assignment was leaked to the Black Cabinet and the press. “You will recall the incident when I was home in 1942,” he wrote Villard, “when irresponsible, unethical Negro weeklies sought to dramatize some work I was doing and made sensational, untruthful statements, which was done without ascertaining the facts.” Walton was also convinced that “FEA representatives were after [his] scalp” when he was in the U.S., calling for clariﬁcation of the Fair Employment Practices policy and administration. One of those ofﬁcials, who was placed in charge of a forestry project in Monrovia, “approached white Americans relative to sending a petition to Washington demanding that I be relieved of this post.” He ended the letter to Villard by asking to serve in Monrovia through the end of 1945, to submit his resignation and have it accepted in

53. See the press release and Smith, “Lester Walton Recalled,” in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1939–1961. 54. Walton to Dunn, May 26, 1945, LAWPA, box 11, ﬁle 7.

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1946, and to be shown the respect that he had earned after “ten years of loyal and efﬁcient service.”55 In the end, Walton’s ﬁnal request was granted, but it was not enough to repair the damage that had been done to his reputation and to his signiﬁcance as a historical actor. His colleagues quietly excluded him from their memoirs about the important work done in Liberia during World War II. Ellis O. Briggs took credit for the treaties negotiated with Liberia; Adolf Berle’s published diaries show no evidence that Walton completed the special assignment or worked with the assistant secretary of state to develop Liberia economically.56 The Black Cabinet in Washington shut him out, effectively erasing him as a World War II–era activist who pushed the Roosevelt administration to address racial discrimination structurally and institutionally rather than casuistically. And he never quite understood why in the late 1940s and early 1950s those interested in Liberia turned to other “experts” instead of to the man who had served as U.S. minister for more than ten years. Even as a hale and hearty septuagenarian, Walton was becoming a ghost. Had the media representations of Walton been accurate, his portrait in pith helmet and white suit would have appropriately cast him as an agent of American hegemony. His donning the dress of the ruler would likely seem to mean more than ﬁghting the broiling sun and tropical humidity or joking with his family at home. It would symbolize Bethune’s assessment of Walton as a silent partner in the “dictatorial set-up in Liberia”— that is, if we grant politically motivated press releases truth status on a par with other documentary evidence. But Walton’s writings and actions, little known to his contemporaries and even less known today, along with the manner in which career diplomats bypassed him and diverted his energy away from the African republic, suggest a more complex story. What I discovered as I tried to clear a path through the archival underbrush was that for most of his tenure, Walton represented Liberia as determinedly as he did the nation of his birth. Its ending aside, Walton’s diplomatic service was a high point in his life, and added to his earlier achievements as a journalist and political party man, it made his historical invisibility all the more astonishing to me—at ﬁrst. I thought it strange that a person with such a high proﬁle could be so easily forgotten or dismissed as insigniﬁcant, especially considering his work in a country that played an important role in an era

55. Walton to Villard, June 25, 1945, LAWPA, box 11, ﬁle 7. 56. Briggs, Farewell to Foggy Bottom; Berle and Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids.

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noted for its centrality in international relations. But then I reﬂected upon my lack of awareness of the army of U.S. representatives stationed around the globe in the twenty-ﬁrst century. I considered how invisible these ﬁgures are to the vast majority of ordinary citizens. Unless one receives a Nobel Prize, becomes U.S. representative to the United Nations, or performs some extraordinary work negotiating conﬂicts in a part of the world that registers in the mass media, he or she, an ordinary, run-of-themill U.S. diplomat, gets little attention. Moreover, Walton was not the ﬁrst American of color to serve in the State Department. Nineteen other African Americans had received appointments to the post in Liberia before Walton, and, in fact, from the end of the Civil War through much of the twentieth century, U.S. presidents considered the post in Liberia to be one where they could send qualiﬁed African Americans as a reward for political support.57 One might think it obvious that an African American would represent the United States in Africa, but that conclusion is a bit hasty. The only other country besides Liberia where America sent black diplomats on a fairly regular basis was Haiti; white diplomats typically represented the United States in other nations inhabited by Africans or African-descended people. As I scrambled to ﬁgure out why Walton’s laudable work in Liberia has been either misrepresented or forgotten, I returned to the clippings Walton had saved in which his appointment was announced. The notice from the New York Times stood out. It opened as follows: The United States Senate in conﬁrming last week the appointment of LESTER A. WALTON as Minister to Liberia has helped to make possible a new and better regime in this Americo-African Republic. The selfgovernment of that little State in which America has had a historic interest and toward which it has shown a “conscience” obligation, has been disappointing, but for all that it has not been proposed to shoot or bomb it into civilization or to use other civilized means to persuade it toward the practices of peoples sworn to ﬁnd some other way than international war to settle their controversies.58

What an odd coupling—a “‘conscience’ obligation” and the possibility (thankfully, rejected) of bombing the country into civilization! Why was Liberia on the United States’ “conscience,” and why did the Times offer such a conﬂicted relationship between violence and civilization?

57. Miller, The Black Presence in American Foreign Affairs, 9–14. 58. “Liberia,” New York Times, July 21, 1935, in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 20.

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In the process of sorting out what Walton’s stint in Liberia meant, I realized how little I knew about the West African republic. Liberia had provided my public school teachers, I remembered, a “teaching moment”—not in history or social studies, but in English grammar—to help us understand “root words.” Liberia and liberty have the same root, and Monrovia was derived from the last name Monroe. Insofar as any historical analysis was involved, we learned unproblematically that President James Monroe had founded the colony of Liberia as a place where former American slaves could enjoy liberty. Later study in history has complicated that simplistic narrative by showing how “colonization” was entwined in the controversy over slavery in antebellum America, but except for questioning the motives of the American Colonization Society and showing how few former African American slaves actually went to Africa, I had learned very little about Liberia’s history after its founding in the 1820s. My search for a deeper understanding of Liberian history led me to Charles Spurgeon Johnson’s Bitter Canaan, a book written in the 1930s. Its opening pages drew me into the tragic drama of settlement in the 1820s on the west coast of Africa and thoroughly messed up the sanitized version of colonization. To put the matter bluntly, Liberia was a product of the U.S. desire to export its problems with race in the early nineteenth century. Under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817, ships delivered African American migrants to a crude outpost in West Africa in the hope of carving out a colony to which free men and women of color could “return.” Calling the migrants’ voyage to Africa a “return,” however, denies the reality of their birth and family ties in North America and makes plain the refusal to count their labors and institutions, culture and presence as legitimate and indigenous in the young nation. Referring to the founding of a colony that within a quarter century declared its national independence tricks one into thinking that the land in West Africa was unoccupied, just waiting for the arrival of hardy, black pioneers to subdue the tropics, build homes and towns, and gradually put into place the infrastructures for trade, travel, and government. In reality, the ﬁrst settlers literally fought for their lives and likely would have been wiped out completely by the native groups on whose land they were trespassing had it not been for the fairly regular reinforcements—weapons, ammunition, food, supplies, and people—sent by the colonization society. Even when hostilities with natives subsided, the migrants faced disease with which they were little prepared to cope. As Johnson described these early years, Liberia was, indeed, a “bitter Canaan,” hardly a promised land of milk and honey for America’s unwanted. Whatever travails migrants, and later, Liberians faced were to white America of little consequence, even

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though it was America’s inability to shoulder the responsibilities that attended race-based slavery that created the conditions for social and cultural conﬂict in the tiny African republic. Johnson’s work was not particularly hostile to the United States of the 1820s or, for that matter, of the 1930s. As a prominent sociologist at Fisk University, Johnson had gathered the materials for this project while serving on a commission charged by the League of Nations to investigate charges of slavery in Liberia that surfaced in the late 1920s. If America’s role in founding a colony to send free blacks into exile made white people squirm, the revelation that the descendants of American slaves had either condoned or participated in the renewal of the heinous practice of human bondage shocked and dismayed African Americans. Thus, when news about Liberia surfaced in the consciousness of the world, in general, and the United States, in particular, in the late 1920s, it caused a scandal. The country whose founders were all ex-slaves or their descendants and whose motto was “The love of liberty brought us here,” tolerated the unthinkable—the practice of slavery in the twentieth century. The League of Nations appointed Arthur Barclay (a former president of Liberia), Cuthbert Christy (a British explorer and health expert), and Johnson to a commission charged with investigating whether slavery and forced labor were, indeed, practiced in Liberia and if they were, the extent of the practice and of the involvement of government ofﬁcials. Insiders in the U.S. State Department had known about the questionable labor practices for a couple of years before the scandal broke, but they had tried to contain the crisis lest its reach extend to Harvey S. Firestone’s operation in Liberia and European colonial regimes in other parts of Africa. The State Department also wanted to cover up the fact that ofﬁcials there had known about slavery, forced labor, pawning, and the shipping of Liberian laborers to work in the Spanish colony of Fernando Po and had done nothing to discourage or stop any of these forms of illegal labor relations. The ﬁnal report of the commission, attributed to Christy but actually written by Johnson, struck a balance between the kinds of labor relations that arose from traditional customs and those that came about because of new markets for unfree labor. The commission recommended reforms necessary to bring Liberia into compliance with the League of Nations 1926 Antislavery Convention and implicated high government ofﬁcials in the scandal, which led to their removal from power. The Firestone Rubber Company was exonerated of any wrongdoing, although it became clear that the demand for labor on their plantations put tremendous pressure on the villages whose sons went to work for the Firestones, because their departure left fewer ablebodied adults to generate goods and revenue needed to pay hut taxes to the

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central government.59 While the United States and the League of Nations clucked their tongues at Liberia’s misdeeds and held the hoops through which the republic had to jump in order to return to the good graces of the international community, not a single case of forced labor in European colonial holdings drew attention or condemnation. All of this critical attention nevertheless ignored the conditions under which Liberia had been founded and the precariousness of the ﬁrst settlers’ situation. Surrounded by suspicious native groups, who were none too eager to tolerate the invaders, African American migrants began to establish settlements, build homes, and cultivate the land in this unfamiliar place. Having been denied citizenship in the United States, these Americo-Liberians, nonetheless, were expected to erect governing structures and networks of exchange that would constitute a political-economic entity. Against all odds, and with support from the American Colonization Society, they struggled for both subsistence and stability. In 1847, Liberians declared their independence from the American Colonization Society and assumed the status, albeit shaky, at best, of a republic. I read Bitter Canaan on a train from Indianapolis to New York, where I planned to spend about a month in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture reading Walton’s papers. I had not anticipated the power of Johnson’s prose and couldn’t have imagined how it would resonate almost seven decades after it was written. The seat next to mine remained unoccupied as the train made its way eastward in the wee hours of the morning, but somewhere in Ohio, an elderly white man planted himself next to me; his destination was Philadelphia. I judged him to be in his eighties and felt a kind of granddaughterly concern as he was hobbling down the aisle looking for a place to sit. But as the train took a southeasterly turn, heading toward Charlottesville, Virginia, before angling northward along the eastern seaboard, an increasing number of African American travelers boarded the train at each stop. With every new darkskinned arrival, he launched on a new screed about the “schwarzes” and their loud music and uncouth ways. I wanted to shrink into the upholstery. I tried to ditch him in Washington, D. C., where we had to change trains, but I could no more successfully rid myself of this symbol of white racism than Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man could dispose of his cast-iron doorstop symbolizing black stereotype. In between his vile outbursts, I read Bitter Canaan, and I understood in a profoundly emotional way how

59. John H. Stanﬁeld II, “Introductory Essay: Bitter Canaan’s Historical Backdrop,” in Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic, xi–lxxiii.

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free people of color could venture into the unknown in the hope of escaping the poisonous atmosphere of nineteenth-century America. I recall vividly comments in the late 1960s, after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, that change in U.S. race relations could not happen “overnight,” and now, some forty years later, I wondered how far we really had come. One of the hindrances to progress is ignorance. I can’t help wondering how differently things might have turned out had Johnson been able to publish his book. The Bitter Canaan I read on the train—indeed, the only extant published version—did not appear in print until 1987, brought out not by Johnson but by John Stanﬁeld, who had discovered the manuscript among Johnson’s papers and who conducted extensive archival research needed to justify its importance as a work of scholarship. Johnson considered Bitter Canaan his best writing, but the 1930s proved inauspicious for publication. Even in the mid-1940s, when Liberia was approaching its centennial, Johnson failed to get it in print. He submitted a revised manuscript to the University of Chicago Press, and it received a positive review from Jackson Davis of the Rockefeller General Education Board and soon-to-be president of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Davis’s endorsement probably would have been enough to persuade the editors to publish Johnson’s work, but the author decided to send it to Eric Williams (a prominent African American historian), Charles Thompson (dean of the graduate school at Howard University), and Claude A. Barnett, all of whom discouraged Chicago from publishing. The problem, as Stanﬁeld discovered, was that Johnson’s work “contained a paradigm that countered the popular ideological stance of the Black bourgeoisie in Liberia . . . [in that it was] pro-native in its sympathetic portrayals of native life and its destruction by Amero-Liberian (sic) labor practices and societal organization.” It thus cut across the grain of a dominant African American view that only modernization and economic development in Liberia could save the republic from continued scandal. Bitter Canaan was my introduction to Liberian history, and although it was not published in Johnson’s lifetime, its ﬁndings have been corroborated and ampliﬁed by scholarship that has appeared since. It’s clear that at the time Walton assumed the post as U.S. minister, many parties—the African American bourgeoisie, white philanthropists, business interests, and perhaps the remnants of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association—were interested in Liberia, but few were eager to recall the founding of the original colony or the history of the republic that emerged after 1847. This history offers a shameful reminder of ongoing race-based oppression and the ﬁckle ways Americans deﬁne national interests.

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I was reminded of just how reluctant Americans are to remember the nation’s inglorious role in Liberia when my local newspaper, the Lafayette Journal and Courier, published an Associated Press story on Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s inauguration in 2006 as president of “war-ruined” Liberia. The story offers this brief historical sketch: “Founded by freed American slaves in 1847, Liberia was prosperous and peaceful for more than a century, bolstered by abundant timber and diamond wealth. But back-to-back civil wars from 1989 to 2003 brought the country to its knees, killing 200,000 people and displacing half the nation’s population of 3 million.”60 The twenty-ﬁve-year involvement of the American Colonization Society is simply excised. The changes brought about by Firestone’s operations are forgotten. Even the slavery scandal is displaced by a picture of prosperity and peace. Indeed, the only reason offered for Liberia’s present-day fragility is civil war, but no insight is offered into the nature of the civil divide. The truncated “history” of Liberia elides international inﬂuences that contributed to the social breakdown of the late twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S.–Liberian relations evolved in ways that seemed to deny American involvement in its early history. When Liberia declared its independence in 1847, an event that could have been viewed as an opportunity to celebrate the success of the transplanted Americans, the United States refused to recognize the republic. Of course, in the midst of an escalating sectional crisis, acknowledging the right and capacity of Negroes to rule a land would have fueled the ﬁery debates in the United States about the rights and living conditions of African Americans, both free and slave. U.S. recognition of Liberia did not come until the 1860s. In the years following the U.S. Civil War, petitions for assistance from Liberia competed with a domestic agenda of reconstructing the torn nation and with the economic roller coaster set in motion by industrialization. Liberia’s needs fell far down the list of American priorities in these years. The Area Handbook for Liberia, published by the Government Printing Ofﬁce in 1972, blandly admitted, “Although the United States gave periodic moral support to the Negro republic, it gave little material or technical assistance” until the 1940s.61 At the same time, British and French interests in west Africa positioned Europeans to deal with the republic. Inadequate loans grudgingly given by the Britain, France, and the United States in 1870, 1905, 1909, 1912, and 1927, kept the Republic of Liberia in a state of dependence, and strict 60. Hans Nichols, “Woman Now Leads Liberia,” Lafayette (Indiana) Journal and Courier, January 17, 2006, A-3, col. 3. 61. Thomas D. Roberts, et al., Area Handbook for Liberia, 7–8.

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repayment schedules prevented the nation’s leaders from investing in economic development.62 Americans adopted the Europeans’ attitude of weary impatience with Liberia, even though the language used to describe the relationship between the United States and Liberia—“ward,” “step-child”—served as reminders of America’s less-than-admirable role in the founding of the African republic. For the most part, however, judging by the absence of Liberia from U.S. textbooks and the relative silence about Liberian experience since independence in the 1840s, relatively few people gave much thought to a colony founded so that there was a place to send former slaves.63 From many perspectives, Walton’s appointment in Liberia was no glamour job. The United States had withdrawn recognition of Liberia in December 1930 because of the League of Nations investigation.64 The legation was out of date and in a disgraceful state of disrepair. Tropical diseases plagued the area; substandard sanitation and healthcare systems did little to protect native Liberians and foreigners from the ravages of malaria, fevers, and elephantiasis. George Schuyler, writing in 1933 after a recent visit to the country, recorded his shock upon arriving in Monrovia “by the lack of common sanitation, the unpaved, rock-strewn, meandering, weedgrown, unlighted streets, the swarms of rats, and the general atmosphere of shiftlessness and decay.”65 Generalized poverty made food stores of the privileged vulnerable to hungry petty thieves. Even the capital’s electrical grid shut down every night, leaving foreigners, starved for the entertainment of the airwaves, shut off from transatlantic programming after midnight. Liberian society was rife with social tension—among indigenous tribes living within its borders and between these various groups and the Americo-Liberians who dominated the central government and enjoyed the privileges of power and governance. And in 1935, when Walton set sail for this new post, the Republic of Liberia clung tenaciously to its status as an independent nation governed by men of African descent on a continent overwhelmingly in the thrall of European colonial rule. Had Liberia occupied a larger space in American consciousness in these years or were Liberia today one of Africa’s “success stories” instead of one 62. Ibid., 7; Lester A. Walton, “Depression-Hit Liberia Debates Acceptance of League Assistance but Struggles to Keep Autonomy,” New York Herald-Tribune, December 3, 1933, 2:6, col. 1–4; and Russell U. McLoughlin, Foreign Investment and Development in Liberia, 45–46. 63. See for an example, Emerson David Fite, History of the United States, 254. 64. “Liberia,” International Conciliation, 363. 65. George S. Schuyler, “Uncle Sam’s Black Step-Child,” 147.

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presented as an earthly stand-in for Dante’s Inferno, Walton might well be remembered as the U.S. minister who helped turn the republic’s humiliation and disorder into progressive economic development. Because of his impressive ability to use U.S. capitalist investment, philanthropic resources, and military power to the advantage of men and women in Liberia—both natives and Americo-Liberians—he might be counted as a pioneer in transnational racial solidarity. But even in the histories that have been written to tell of U.S.–Liberian relations, of interest typically to specialists in diplomatic history or international relations, he’s largely missing or misrepresented. To grasp why and how Walton has slipped out of the memory and historical accounts of U.S. interest in Liberia is intriguing. He faded not because he failed to represent America well; in the course of representing his country’s interests, Walton showed himself to be a representative American attuned to the nation’s interests. He disappeared partly because that’s the fate of most people who serve as representatives abroad. His colleagues in the State Department could not completely remove him from ofﬁce, but they did usher him out of their self-congratulatory narratives, throwing later scholars off his scent. Liberia, too, played a role. Its founding represents the failure of the United States to bear the burden of racebased slavery with justice and mercy. Liberia’s struggle to retain its place in the community of sovereign nations implicates the United States again, this time for its callous disregard for the nation’s dark exiles. The U.S.– Liberian relationship during World War II served the strategic purposes of moving men and material from North America to Europe without interruption and cutting off a key route to South America for Axis powers; it also became a convenient place to station black American troops. Liberian land yielded and Liberian people harvested Firestone’s rubber, ensuring the U.S. supply of this essential wartime commodity, a contribution to the war effort quickly forgotten when synthetics obviated the need for continued investment in Liberia after the war. Unlike Moses, Walton did not disobey the gods—capitalism and the U.S. State Department—but he was barred nonetheless from the history of even this bitter Canaan.

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For most of its history—both as a colony and as an independent nation—Liberia was a mystery to Americans. The most sanguine of viewers in the nineteenth century thought of it as a refuge from slavery and social vulnerability brought on by racial difference for African Americans seeking freedom and autonomy. The love of liberty expressed in the nation’s motto encapsulated this understanding of Liberia. Relatively few Americans of African descent ventured away from their native land to become pioneers in Africa in the decades before the U.S. Civil War. Publications of the American Colonization Society carried stories about their experiences, and extant letters sent back home ﬁlled in the grimmer reality from which the white proponents of the endeavor hoped to shield prospective emigrants and Christian philanthropists. After the U.S. Civil War, and especially once the post-Reconstruction backlash against former slaves set in, some African Americans looked to Liberia as a land of opportunity. The grandfather of C. L. Simpson, Liberia’s secretary of state in the 1930s and 1940s, was one of these migrants. Simpson reported years later that his forbears had left the United States in 1878 because of the hostility shown by southerners to the freedmen and freedwomen, the “restriction of their civic rights,” their economic subordination, and their “inability to get ahead in agriculture which was their chief source of livelihood.” And they wanted to take part in the “redemption of the black race

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in Africa.”1 Various “back to Africa” movements, like the one inspired by the Rev. Henry Turner, sparked continued interest in Liberia among men and women of African descent in the late nineteenth century. But for most white Americans, Liberia was a vague place on a “dark continent,” whose “history” began and ended with the ﬁrst colonists who set sail for freedom. The founding of Liberia merited little more than a sentence in most U.S. history textbooks as an example of generous white Americans’ opposition to slavery, educators apparently thought that was all schoolchildren needed to know. I wondered what Liberia conjured in Americans’ imagination before the slavery scandal brought Liberia into the consciousness of the community of nations, so I decided to go to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to see what kinds of articles on the republic had been published in the 1920s. Liberia appeared in U.S. periodical literature rather sporadically as an object of Christian missionary efforts and of philanthropic reformers, a curious land of “naked savages” ripe for anthropological study and of comical “high hats,” and a nation, incredibly, governed by black men. Many writers emphasized its miniscule size by referring to it as the “tiny” or “little” African republic or by including maps that portrayed it as a small black dot on the western edge of the continent. Indeed most of the articles in the 1920s that featured Liberia betrayed the racist assumptions alive and well in that era. The American Review of Reviews trumpeted Liberia’s fresh start as the subject of one of the leading articles for 1925, although the piece asserted that current conditions were “hardly more discouraging” than when the ﬁrst settlers had arrived more than a century before. John W. Vandercook’s description of Liberian ofﬁcials, published in World’s Work the following year, evoked the image of the blackface comedian. “A charming black gentleman in a musical comedy blue uniform several sizes too large, and a beehive helmet fronted with an enormous silver star reposes in the shade of a tree at one side of the road. He is Monrovia’s trafﬁc cop.” And “Liberia, unwilling always to get down to hard work and force the fertile soil to yield its riches, has from the ﬁrst lived on borrowed money—a business in which she has been extraordinarily unlucky and extraordinarily honest.” The Literary Digest illustrated its report on Liberia’s full repayment of a war loan with a cartoon taken from the Dallas News. While the text congratulated the “little negro republic” for being only the second nation to repay its war debt, the cartoon represented Liberia as a barefoot pickaninny, dressed in tattered clothing and speaking in the dialect of American blackface minstrelsy— 1. Simpson, Memoirs, 28, 50–53.

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”White folks, hyah’s yo’ money.” In short, the dominant image of Liberia represented to the general American public was a pastiche of jungle savages, burnt-cork comedians, and slothful black men and women unable to succeed in the modern world. Du Bois summed up the widespread attitude in an essay for the New Republic in 1925 in which he stated bluntly, “That Liberia is an ‘inferior’ country is easy for America to believe for two reasons: ﬁrst, it is ruled and inhabited by Negroes. Second, nearly all books and magazine articles say so.”2 The agreement in 1926 that brought Firestone to Liberia put the republic in the news again, but it didn’t alter the overall perception of Africa, Africans, or Americo-Liberians. The focus of most of these articles was on Firestone’s determination to cultivate a valuable commodity to serve the needs of American consumers. Through his enterprise, the United States was “unlocking the tropics” and breaking the “rubber monopoly” controlled by the British since 1922.3 Liberia appeared as incidental to a story of American economic activity—the right country in the right place at the right time—ﬁguring principally as a troubled land that would no doubt beneﬁt from the infusion of capital as well as the presence of business and scientiﬁc experts and their demand for services, which would necessarily lead to improvements in transportation, communication, health care, sanitation, and education—improvements that on their own they would never make.4 Firestone’s white critics emphasized the impact his investment in Liberia might have on U.S. taxpayers if the venture failed and the long history of ﬁnancial disaster that haunted Liberia. Relatively little of the space devoted to Firestone’s loan agreement, ninety-nine-year lease, and rubber plantations included descriptions of the land, society, history, and people of Liberia. Indeed, none of these authors agreed on the size of the population.5 2. “Liberia’s Fresh Start,” 433–34; “An Educational Program for the Republic of Liberia,” 611; Walter B. Williams, “A Miracle for the Republic of Liberia,” 683–86; Mrs. Walter B. Williams, “A House by a West African Road,” 874–77; John W. Vandercook, “High Hats in Liberia: How the Negro Republic Is Governed,” 670–76; “Liberia Pays in Full,” 12; “Where the Negro Rules,” 17; Raymond Leslie Buell, “Mr. Firestone’s Liberia,” 521–24; Robinson Newcomb, “The Natives of Liberia,” 669; and W. E. B. Du Bois, “Liberia and Rubber,” 326–29. 3. “America’s Answer to the Rubber Monopoly,” 518. 4. “French Debts and Liberian Rubber,” 479; Arthur Pound, “Unlocking the Tropics via Liberia,” 555–56; and “America’s Answer to the Rubber Monopoly,” 518–20. 5. The most imposing critic of Firestone was Raymond Leslie Buell, and both Firestone and the State Department were prepared to counter every negative comment about the loan agreement with evidence either of Buell’s “bias” or of the “success” of the plantation. See Stanﬁeld, “Introductory Essay,” in Johnson, Bitter Canaan, xxviii–xx; and Buell, “Mr. Firestone’s Liberia.” For another critical perspective, see “French Debts and Liberian Rubber.”

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This brief survey of Liberia’s image in the United States is based on partial and biased sources. That is, it is based on articles listed in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, which in the 1920s and 1930s did not include articles published in African American periodicals. Although Negro writers like Du Bois, George S. Schuyler, and even Walton wrote articles that appeared in mainstream magazines, the authors of the most widely read representations of Liberia were by and large not of African descent. Articles that appeared in the African American press were no less biased than those in the white journals and newspapers; they, too, were written from a perspective informed by U.S. race relations and the political visions of their authors. While many accounts of Liberia before the slavery scandal recounted the history of ﬁnancial trouble and the long list of needs for which Liberians required assistance, there was one major difference. Negroes in the United States looked to Liberia as an example of the capacity of black people to govern themselves. Liberia represented hope and inspiration for men and women in the United States struggling to attain full rights as citizens. Typical of this point of view was an article in the New York Age reporting on the return of Ernest Lyon, U.S. minister to Liberia, to New York for a brief vacation in 1909. In response to a toast to “Liberia and the U.S.” made at a gathering of African Americans in New York, Lyon declared: I want to see Liberia saved, not merely for the Liberians as such, but for the whole Negro race. It is sad to think that out of twelve million square miles of territory which constitute the area of the continent of Africa, only about forty thousand square miles remain in the hands of black people. Eleven million, nine hundred sixty thousand square miles have been parceled out among the European nations. You feel with me that this little spot, known as Liberia, ought to be saved and held as an experiment station on the West Coast of Africa for the practice and development of Negro self-government. . . . No argument is sufﬁciently potent no matter by [whom] made, that can release the race in the United States of its responsibility and obligation in Liberia. The reputation of the race is bound up with the success of the experiment in government on the West Coast of Africa.6

Support for Liberia might take the form of investment, philanthropy, migration, or lobbying for the government to ally itself with the republic. And in any case, interest in and awareness of Liberia among African Americans far outpaced that shown by the vast majority of whites in the United States.

6. “Three Needs of Liberia Republic,” New York Age, November 25, 1909, 5, col. 1–2.

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Then as now, it’s not easy to determine how best to “help” another country, another people. Private commitments go a long way, but in the 1920s, African Americans generally continued to struggle economically; that is, there was not sufﬁcient capital in the hands of black business people to divert large sums for investing overseas. Black entrepreneurs, unlike their better-known white counterparts, had not enjoyed the conﬁdence of public leaders and statesmen, had not strolled comfortably down the corridors of power in Washington, D. C., and had few illusions that they could expect to precipitate policy changes at the national level that would produce a relationship between the United States and Liberia even remotely resembling that fostered between the U.S. and, say, England or France. Thus, for some, Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line seemed attractive as a scheme for “universal Negro improvement.” For others, voluntary missionary work, built on the service and uplift ethics reﬂected in the work of club women who, at the turn of the twentieth century, did much to ameliorate educational and social conditions for a recently emancipated but still oppressed people, seemed like a better alternative. Intellectuals like Du Bois, of course, hoped that a reasoned and informed analysis of the history and economics of Liberia would persuade those in power to formulate appropriate policies in Africa; in the end, he tried to forge transnational “pan-African” alliances that would unite black people across the globe in the cause of political, economic, and social justice. Each of these strategies came with consequences no one could anticipate, and they did not, by themselves, always lead to results for which the planners hoped or of which Liberians themselves approved. Like others inspired by a sense of obligation to Liberia, Walton took part in these ongoing debates and discussions. He had been thinking periodically about Africa generally and Liberia particularly since his days at the St. Louis Star at the dawn of the twentieth century. He had not only witnessed and reviewed Williams’s and Walkers’s and Ernest Hogan’s early 1900s shows that made art and entertainment out of American adventures in Africa, but he also had encountered the Kafﬁrs at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, likely interviewed Ernest Lyon in 1909, and had enjoyed close relations with two Negroes selected to represent the United States in Liberia—J. Milton Turner and Fred R. Moore (who was appointed by William Howard Taft in 1913 but was withdrawn by Woodrow Wilson before he set sail).7 Walton had sailed to Europe after the Great War with, among others, Thomas Jesse Jones, who was the educational director of the

7. Miller, The Black Presence in American Foreign Affairs, 9, 16.

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Phelps-Stokes Fund, which supported philanthropic activities in Liberia and other parts of Africa. In the 1920s, he trained his attention directly on Liberia and began in earnest to represent Liberia in ways that he hoped would create a different mental image of the republic than the one that then prevailed. But do not for one instant assume that because of his ethnic heritage or the color of his skin Walton was any more “authentic” an advocate for Liberian development than the white philanthropists, businessmen, or politicians with and for whom he worked. Walton believed unconditionally in the superiority of modern technology, a Western standard of living, and in the power of capital investment to improve the quality of life for all who learned and embraced the best business practices. For Walton, the best way to foster the “experiment in government on the West Coast of Africa” was to introduce the products and industry, experts and latest technologies, and a cultural mind-set particular to modernity. Walton began crafting an image of Liberia as a journalist at the New York World. In 1924, for example, he wrote a feature on the inauguration of President Charles D. B. King, an event attended by Du Bois, who was appointed by Calvin Coolidge as a special envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. The most important news of note about the new administration was that H. Too Wesley, a member of the Grebo tribe, was sworn in as King’s vice president. Considering the widespread perception of native Liberians as “naked savages,” Wesley’s distinguished position gave Walton the chance to showcase successful assimilation into Western political life. He concluded the article by quoting Helen Curtis, the widow of a former U.S. minister to Liberia, who noted that the road construction then under way could not have been begun without the cooperation between native chiefs and the central government in Monrovia.8 A few years later Walton featured the Booker T. Washington Institute as the new Tuskegee of Liberia. He noted that the Phelps-Stokes Fund had provided the bulk of the funds to create the school, but that Liberia had ceded one thousand acres for the campus and had promised to contribute ﬁve thousand dollars a year for ten years to help improve the much-needed educational facility.9 Even at the height of the slavery scandal, Walton found ways to write against the grain of disgust with Liberia’s betrayal of its own beginnings. In 1931, he wrote about a recent, devastating yellow fever epidemic that required immediate attention to sanitation in Liberia. He

8. Lester A. Walton, “Native African Is Vice President of Liberia Now,” New York World, March 23, 1924, M-12, col. 1–4. 9. Lester A. Walton, “Liberia to Have Tuskegee of Its Own,” New York World, March 17, 1929, E-14, col. 1–2.

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reported on the death of the U.S. minister, W. T. Francis, as a result of the raging disease but resisted the notion that U.S. advisors, missionaries, and philanthropists should pull up stakes and leave the republic. Walton noted that a wholesale withdrawal of Americans would close 108 of the 164 schools operating in the republic. And without education, future generations of Liberians would be as helpless as their ancestors to create modern conditions.10 On the eve of the international investigation into charges of slavery in Liberia, Walton visited the country and prepared an article for Current History on its “new industrial development.” Like other journalists and commentators writing about Liberia in the late 1920s, Walton credited the Firestone plantations with stimulating Liberia’s economic development, but Walton made the Liberians key actors in their own right, not merely passive recipients of Firestone’s largesse. His description of the land and people defamiliarized them as being ahum with activity—“Harbors are becoming a reality. Motor roads are being built and modern machinery installed. Vast stretches of the jungle have blossomed into a kaleidoscope picture of industrial life. The touch of modernity is visible on every hand. Thousands of natives are enjoying unprecedented prosperity. For the ﬁrst time in their lives they are ﬁnding steady employment, and looking forward to a regular pay-day.” Walton quoted President King at length and included a photograph of the Liberian leader sitting next to Harvey S. Firestone Jr., both men impeccably dressed. A street scene from Monrovia featured frame houses and fully clad men and women strolling on either side of railroad tracks that bisect the city. Even the native dwellings are described as “adobe houses with thatched roofs”—terms that made them seem slightly less exotic. Walton opened the ﬁnal paragraph with the question that clearly was driving his portrayal of Liberia: “Is a black group capable of self-government?” His response credited Liberians with taking the initiative. The government had “not hesitated to lease 1,000,000 of its 29,000,000 acres to Firestone,” and in so doing “Liberia has made it possible for [Firestone] to set up a great rubber empire within its boundaries.” Commenting on the ﬂow of assistance, but reversing the usual understanding of donor and recipient, Walton asserted, “In lending a helping hand the republic is in turn beneﬁted. Today it enjoys a more commanding and respected status among governments, and bids fair to take a more prominent part in international life.”11 10. Lester A. Walton, “Liberia Suffers Bad Sanitary Conditions,” New York World, February 1, 1931, E-4, col. 8. 11. Walton, “Liberia’s New Industrial Development,” 108–14.

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Under his byline, Walton is identiﬁed as “Former Managing Editor, The New Age” (meaning, of course, the New York Age), not as a reporter for the New York World. Someone besides his employer ﬁnanced the trip to Liberia, his travel within the country, and the photographic shoots that yielded material for illustrating the piece. Walton’s opportunity to represent Liberia in this new, positive way arose from one or possibly two sources. In the early 1920s, Thomas Jesse Jones had recommended Walton to Anson Phelps-Stokes for doing public relations work for his family’s philanthropic foundation, or to use his words, “to conduct constructive propaganda among Negroes and whites.”12 Not surprisingly, representatives of the Phelps-Stokes Fund appeared in Walton’s article as early advocates of Liberia’s prospects for economic development. Throughout his tenure as U.S. minister Walton remained in close contact with Jones and Phelps-Stokes and supported their projects in Liberia. Indeed, after nearly a decade in his position, Walton received a letter from Phelps-Stokes gushing with enthusiasm over the latest signs of cooperation between the government of Liberia and the State Department on behalf of the Booker T. Washington Institute. “[Y]our active interest in Kakata means much to us,” he wrote, and thanked the U.S. minister for his desire “to continue to help us in every way you can.” In his reply, Walton situated his commitment to the school in Kakata within a larger project: “Please be assured of my continued cooperation. No one is more eager to see the school integrated as a recognized constructive force in the comprehensive economic and social program which Liberia has undertaken with the assistance of the United States.”13 Given the Phelps-Stokes objectives—to promote reform and progress in Liberia and to garner the assistance of others through positive press coverage of the republic—it is possible that its directors hired Walton to tout the great changes taking place in the west coast of Africa. An even more direct source of funding for Walton’s trip and story on Liberia might have been the Firestones. The rubber magnates were heralded by Walton as the engines that were driving the wheels of progress, or to use his words “the basic and motivating cause” of Liberia’s transformation.14 In later years, Walton would refer to Harvey S. Firestone as a friend of long standing, but in the 1920s and 1930s, their relationship was professional

12. Quoted in Kenneth James King, Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race, Philanthropy, and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa, 137. 13. Anson Phelps-Stokes to Walton, March 6, 1944; Walton to Phelps-Stokes, June 1, 1944, both in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 19. See also Thomas Jesse Jones to Walton, June 28, 1938, in LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr., 6/1938. 14. Walton, “Liberia’s New Industrial Development,” 108.

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rather than personal. The evidence for Walton’s work on behalf of the Firestones is embedded in the correspondence between Walton and Barnett— it was not, to my knowledge, a matter of public record. Indeed, most of the letters exchanged between the two African American newsmen were written in a private code, suggesting that neither one wanted to leave a trail that would lead directly to the Rubber Barons. Only one letter marked “please destroy,” written by Walton, managed to survive in Barnett’s papers.15 But shortly after Walton returned from Liberia in 1929, he sent a letter to Barnett, instructing him to release a story based on a radiogram sent from the Firestone plantation. He added a brief postscript: “Am running Firestone’s radiogram in next week’s Age. LAW.”16 From the time Walton’s article appeared in Current History in April 1929, until his departure for Monrovia as the U.S. minister in 1935, Walton and Barnett worked closely with the Firestones to promote interest in and sympathy for Liberia and the positive impact Firestone’s location there was having on the country.17 The slavery “scandal” and the international investigation, as you can imagine, represented more than a wrinkle in this public relations agenda. They exposed some unsavory aspects of Liberian society and governance and divided onetime allies working to modernize and assist Liberia. It must have been something of a blow to Walton to read an essay by R. B. Eleazer, a member of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which appeared in the Negro World. A longtime advocate of racial equality, who had fed Walton data and press releases to include in his New York World features, Eleazer scored the Liberians in the aftermath of the League of Nations investigation. “One would suppose,” he wrote, “that two hundred years of bondage in America would have weaned Negroes completely from the traditional practice of slavery. Set free and repatriated on their own continent, one certainly would not have expected American Liberians to enslave benighted natives, less fortunate members of their own race. Yet it appears that this is just what many of them did.”18 15. Walton to Barnett, February 13, 1933, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927– 1934. 16. Walton to Barnett, May 11, 1929, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927–1934. 17. This stash of letters in the Barnett Papers may well have escaped the notice of John Stanﬁeld when he was researching the backstory of Bitter Canaan. Nowhere in his discussion does he indicate that Walton had any interest in Liberia, Firestone, the Booker T. Washington Institute, or the slavery scandal. See Stanﬁeld, “Introductory Essay,” in Johnson, Bitter Canaan. 18. R. B. Eleazer, “Now Liberia Rubbed into American Negro,” Negro World, January 31, 1931, 1, col. 4. For the close collaboration between Walton and Eleazer, see Eleazer to Walton, April 21, 1926, and press release subjects, undated, both in LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 1.

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Another associate, George S. Schuyler, who praised Walton for his grasp of the political and economic situation in Liberia, published an article called “Uncle Sam’s Black Step-Child” in the American Mercury. In it he described conditions in the republic’s capital that no doubt reinforced the generally unﬂattering perception of Africa held by many of the American Mercury’s readers: The Aframerican who goes there a resolute advocate of Liberian independence is more than likely to come away convinced of the necessity for American intervention. Arriving in Monrovia, the capital, enthusiastic over being at last in a country ruled by black men, he is shocked by the lack of common sanitation, the unpaved, rock-strewn, meandering, weed-grown, unlighted streets, the swarm of rats, and the general atmosphere of shiftlessness and decay. He ﬁnds a government combining the worst corruptions of American democracy with complete incompetence and barbaric cruelty. He ﬁnds a ruling class that is lazy, shiftless and unprincipled. He ﬁnds the trade of the country in the hands of Germans, Britishers, Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Syrians, and the only bank, controlled by the Firestone Company, an American concern. He learns that no one will employ Liberians because of their incurable untrustworthiness.19

The biggest problem for Walton was that there was a painful truth in these kinds of writings—even though he would insist they did not tell the whole story. Walton’s friend Du Bois lashed out against the league’s decision to investigate the charge of slavery in Liberia in an article for the Crisis in 1931. Unlike Eleazer and Schuyler, he placed the blame for conditions in the republic squarely on the shoulders of the Western powers—especially England and France—that had encroached on Liberian territory, had made loans to the country on outrageous terms, and had insisted on the creation of the Liberian Frontier Force now at the center of the controversy. As Du Bois saw the situation, the combination of economic exploitation and the presence of an armed militia accustomed to bullying natives to cough up the taxes needed to ﬁnance repayment of the debt had resulted in the atrocious labor practices now being condemned. But he also insisted that the league had turned a blind eye to the equally exploitative and reprehensible policies of colonial regimes in other parts of Africa.20 Du Bois’s screed

19. Schuyler, “Uncle Sam’s Black Step-Child,” 147. 20. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Liberia,” 101–2.

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prompted Charles Spurgeon Johnson to respond by correcting some of Du Bois’s overstatements in the next issue of the periodical.21 But that response and the developments of the next couple of years only hardened Du Bois’s conﬁdence in his analysis. In a 1933 article for Foreign Affairs he blasted not only the European powers but also Firestone for placing unrealistic conditions on the terms in his company’s leasing of the land for a rubber plantation and for creating a bogus entity, the Finance Corporation, which appeared to be, but was not, independent of the Firestone interests. He concluded this piece by asserting Liberia’s “chief crime is to be black and poor in a rich, white world; and in precisely that portion of the world where color is ruthlessly exploited as a foundation for American and European wealth.”22 In the violent swirl of these competing opinions—none of which was ﬂattering to either Liberia or to the Firestones—Walton resolved to represent the situation in West Africa in terms that would convince activists, philanthropists, and business interests that Liberia was a going concern and a country worthy of their investment. As a pioneer in mass media and public relations, Walton ﬁrmly believed that perception preﬁgured reality. He was not blind to Liberia’s problems, ranging from the maladministration of the hinterland tribes to the poor business sense of many elected ofﬁcials. But in an age when the ups and down of markets affected the quality of life in places all across the globe and when advertising and public relations were among the largest of U.S. businesses because they fueled desire and consumerism, Walton recognized that for a society to progress along American lines, it had to have the right image. After his initial visit to Africa in 1929, Walton immersed himself in information on Liberia. He covered the meeting in Geneva where the league’s investigative team presented its ﬁndings, and he returned to Liberia in 1933 to familiarize himself with government ofﬁcials and the reasons underlying their resistance to an American plan of assistance. In 1933, with a new administration at the helm in Washington, Walton also began to position himself as the most qualiﬁed person to man the post in Monrovia should Roosevelt decide to reestablish formal ties with Liberia. Of course, every party interested in Liberia made the same assumption as Walton—they pinned their hopes on the new American president to support their efforts in Africa. The Firestones hoped that renewed diplomatic ties would lift the shadow from their plantation. Missionaries and philanthropists thought U.S. goodwill and assistance would make their 21. Charles S. Johnson, “Liberia,” 172. 22. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Liberia, the League, and the United States,” 682–95.

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efforts more effective. The Liberians, too, after decades of hot and cold relations with the United States saw the new administration as a new, real, ally, and the alliance one that in the midst of a worldwide depression could beneﬁt both nations. And they all agreed with Walton that a positive image was paramount. Moreover, they all looked to Walton as the man who could create that image. In January 1933, the Firestones invited Walton to Akron, Ohio, where they wined and dined him at their private club, in their mansions and ofﬁces, and during extended tours of the plant and the city. In a letter to Barnett, Walton described the evening in his usual coded language. Firestone’s “secretary took me to PALACE of senior, whom I had met in the morning. There before a big ﬁre-place to the accompaniment of crackling logs, No. 1, No. 2 and a younger member of family discussed with me the situation, No. 1 doing most of the talking.”23 At about the same time, Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Fund wrote Harvey S. Firestone Jr. to report on a series of conferences he had held with inﬂuential individuals among the friends of Liberia, including Bishop Campbell, Ellis O. Briggs, and Lester Walton. He reported that the widely held sentiment was that “Mr. Walton should urge the State Department to action as regards publicity.” He noted that if the Firestones approved of the plan, Walton would leave the next day in order to return three days later to meet with George Foster Peabody “who is very inﬂuential with the incoming administration.”24 The Firestones must have agreed, for two days after Jones’s letter was penned, Walton alerted Barnett to a forthcoming press release from the State Department, which he wanted Barnett to send out to the members of the Associated Negro Press.25 In midFebruary, about three weeks after this ﬂurry of activity, the Firestones phoned Walton in New York, asking if he could “meet father and son in Washington” to confer with them before their appointment in the State Department. After a frustrating meeting with the lame-duck secretary of state, the Firestones spent the evening discussing with Walton a “program” involving publicity and regular press releases that would help their cause; they were prepared to pay. Walton would play the point, and they promised to give Claude Barnett appropriate considerations if the publicity campaign 23. Walton to Barnett, January 23, 1933, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927– 1934. 24. Thomas Jesse Jones to Harvey S. Firestone Jr., January 23, 1933, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 3. 25. Walton to Barnett, January 25, 1933, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927– 1934. The press release actually appeared about one month later; a copy of it, headed “FOR THE PRESS, DEPARTMENT OF STATE,” and dated February 27, 1933, is in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 2.

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proved effective.26 From that time on, Walton was in the thick of the publicity campaign that accompanied lobbying efforts on behalf of Liberia. What Walton’s allies might not have realized was that he was working as well for the Liberian government. It gave me a start to read the letter Walton received from President Edwin Barclay after his visit to Liberia in the summer of 1933. Barclay wasted no time getting to the point—“With reference to our conversation of two days ago, I wish to conﬁrm my request that you act as Press Agent for the Government of the Republic of Liberia in America, in order that accurate information with respect to the Government’s policies and activities might be given out through the Press, both white and negro.” Financial arrangements were to be worked out at a later time, and the two men had reached an understanding that if the Liberian government could not immediately foot the bill, Walton would provide his services at no cost.27 I have found no extant document that contains the terms of Walton’s agreement with Barclay. But a letter from 1946 surprised me. It reads simply: “President Tubman directs me to send you $3,500.00 for the publicity matter, which amount please receive from Mr. Watts, Chief Clerk of the Treasury.” It is not clear by whom the letter was sent, but the letter suggests that Walton had been employed as a public relations specialist for Liberia while at the same time representing the United States in Monrovia.28 When Roosevelt ﬁnally decided to restore formal diplomatic contact with Liberia, no other aspirant for the position of U.S. minister could match Walton’s backing. As a professional journalist with an eye for detail and an excellent command of his subject, Walton had absorbed mountains of information on his trips to Liberia. He retained a copy of the League of Nations’ ﬁnal report on slavery, which, thanks to Johnson, included important details about Liberia’s past and present. But at least as important as his command of conditions in the republic were the kinds of people eager to support his candidacy—elite and powerful businessmen and philanthropists and leaders in the African American community. His appointment was conﬁrmed without a quibble. From his diplomatic post Walton represented the interests of the United States while he continued to represent Liberia as a public relations expert—only now he was an eyewitness with access to ofﬁcial information about Liberian ﬁnances, productivity, and reform policies that he could work into press releases and reports to the State Department. 26. Walton to Barnett, February 15, 1933, CABPA, box 187, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1927– 1934. 27. Barclay to Walton, September 23, 1933, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 3. 28. A letter to Walton, February 27, 1946, LAWPA, box 11, ﬁle 2.

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Walton faced an uphill climb recasting Liberia as a responsible nation on the road to recovery. Not only the popular periodical press but also two works by inﬂuential writers presented Liberia as a land of jungles, sloth, primitive ways, and widespread corruption. George S. Schuyler, who as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier enjoyed a large following in the African American community for his biting sarcasm and trenchant commentary on contemporary events, published Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia in 1931 that offered a ﬁctional account of the shipment of Liberian laborers to Fernando Po based on the scandal unearthed by the league. It humanized a story for readers not willing to plow through the dense report of the Christy Commission. The novel showed how the lives of ordinary people were destroyed by the greed of colonial planters, corrupt and vicious Liberian ofﬁcials, and the prisonlike conditions of the work camps in Fernando Po, where long hours of labor, squalid living conditions, and raging tropical diseases ravaged the health and future prospects of the slaves. Through his clever dialogue, Schuyler exposed the linguistic sleight of hand employed by the perpetrators of this forced labor system to justify as opportunity a system that was based on chicanery and coercion. Schuyler offered readers a story in accessible language that condemned Liberians and effectively planted the same idea that lay at the heart of his American Mercury essay—namely, that African Americans should not waste either their sentiment or their investment capital on a society so deeply mired in brutality.29 Shortly after Walton’s arrival in Monrovia, Graham Greene published Journey without Maps: A Travel Book about his recent trip to Liberia. Fans of Greene’s writing were treated to an astonishing account of the author’s psychological journey set against the backdrop of a wild, woolly, and primitive jungle. Though critical readers may have wondered at his own prissy insistence on natives lugging the accoutrements of proper English customs through the rugged overgrown terrain of the interior, Greene’s description of the land, dwellings, people, and customs of Liberia served chieﬂy to reinforce the prevailing stereotypes alive in their own imaginations. Rats, stiﬂing heat, disease-carrying insects, and crude huts were leitmotifs throughout his narrative; vivid descriptions of the size and shape of women’s naked breasts took on the aspect of obsession. Greene’s was an eyewitness account, but like all such narratives it betrayed the author’s ability to see only what he was programmed to see. Liberian 29. George S. Schuyler, Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia. For a contemporary comment on the novel, see “New Move to Save Liberia,” Negro World, July 30, 1932, 1, col. 3; 7, col. 5.

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ofﬁcials appear as menacing ﬁgures, feared by natives and scarcely able to cover their cunning and brutality with the veneer of civility provided by Western attire and modern conveniences. Between the witch doctors and ﬁlth, the unclad men and women and the scheming politicians, Greene’s travel book gave readers no reason to assume that Liberia was capable of either progress or reform.30 One of the ﬁrst things I noticed about Walton’s textual and archival representation of his experience in Liberia was the contrast with what had gone on before. Along with ofﬁcial reports sent to the State Department, one can ﬁnd dozens of press releases—Walton never abandoned his newsman’s instincts and public relations obligation to Liberia—as well as a stack of letters to Claude Barnett containing explicit instructions on what material to make into news stories to circulate through the Associated Negro Press, stories such as Liberia’s Chief Justice Grimes’s election in 1937 to the International Diplomatic Academy and gatherings at the College of Africa and the American Lutheran College.31 Knowing how little most Americans knew of Liberia, Walton wasted no time in insinuating an alternative mental picture of the republic. Where earlier U.S. representatives sent exasperated reports on native uprisings and Liberian ofﬁcials’ stubbornness, Walton emphasized a more “normal” state of affairs. I was struck particularly by the manner in which internal social conﬂicts were reported to the State Department. A report from MacVeagh to Washington just a year before Walton’s arrival describes Liberia as “a country far removed from our sphere of inﬂuence or particular interests and on a continent where the tribal divisions and customs prevent uniﬁcation and cooperation and therefore render self-government, for the time being at least, an impossibility.”32 This is the diplomatic version of naked savages and political chaos. I wondered how Walton would articulate the same issues, for even if MacVeagh lacked conﬁdence in Liberian rulers he did identify important sources of conﬂict. A report called “Kru Controversy,” sent to Washington in 1936 and one of the ﬁrst ofﬁcial reports I encountered in Walton’s archive, is a good example of his approach to this ticklish subject. Walton opened with a brief update that indicated a proposal prepared by the Barclay administration was then “under consideration by four Kru chiefs and members of the tribe,” a statement that implied diplomatic practice. He outlined his own limited role in mediating the negotia-

30. Graham Greene, Journey without Maps: A Travel Book. 31. Walton to Barnett, December 10, 1937, and Walton to Barnett, November 26, 1935, both in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938. 32. MacVeagh to State Department, June 11, 1934, NARA, 882.01 F.C./851.

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tions, then concluded with an insider’s view of the way the “controversy” had become overblown. The British, Walton explained, had lambasted Liberia “for alleged atrocities, etc., which charges have never been substantiated,” and now felt trapped by their own exaggerations. But if the chiefs came to Monrovia willing to accept Barclay’s proposal, the British would then be able to “announce that the Kru question has been satisfactorily settled.”33 In other words, the crisis was the product of Western perceptions rather than insoluble social disorder in Liberia. In these ways, Walton translated politics in Liberia into terms Westerners could recognize and, perhaps, respect. After Liberia’s decades of ﬁscal woes, broken loan agreements, and what many American and European observers saw as inherent laziness and/or swindling, Walton sought to identify and tout instances of economic success. He prepared a lengthy report on Liberian ﬁnances in his second year in ofﬁce that showed that revenues were on the rise, hut taxes had been cut in half, and Liberia’s commitment to the terms of the latest loan agreement was as steadfast as ever.34 While the report to the State Department made note of ongoing tensions between the Liberian leaders and the ﬁnancial administrator as well as a few snags along the road toward progress, his letter to Barnett, from which he expected a substantial news story to be crafted, emphasized the sizeable increase in revenues (up 33.5 percent in one year), the largest budget in the nation’s history since 1928, and a full program of road construction, education and health reform, and reform of hinterland administration. Walton ended the letter by observing that FDR had commended Liberia for her tremendous progress in the past year.35 Before his ﬁrst year in Monrovia had come to an end, Walton had arranged for aerial photographs and motion pictures of Firestone’s plantations and Edwin Barclay’s inauguration to be made and sent to the United States for distribution to newspapers, magazines, and movie houses throughout the country.36 In 1937, when Liberia celebrated its ninetieth anniversary as an independent nation, Walton sent photographs of the celebration to the Liberian consul in New York for publication in American newspapers and periodicals.37 While on leave in New York in 33. KRU CONTROVERSY, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. 34. FINANCES, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. 35. Walton to Barnett, January 9, 1937, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935– 1938. 36. Walton to Barnett, January 20, 1936, CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935– 1938. 37. Walton to secretary of state, September 7, 1937, NARA, 882.00/1062.

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1938, Walton met with the editor of the New York Times to discuss Liberia and to counter some of the negative reports, written by a disaffected teacher at one of the Phelps-Stokes–supported schools in the country. He pointed out the major strides made by the Barclay administration toward straightening out the nation’s ﬁnances and addressing labor, health, and sanitation concerns. Walton also offered a vivid example of the limited funds available to the State Department for assisting struggling nations like Liberia—“the cost of one new battleship is more than the Department receives to conduct affairs of the Government for a whole year”—an example that “seemed to make quite an impression” on the editor.38 In light of Liberia’s new image, President Roosevelt requested a meeting with Walton to inform him that he was prepared to send a team of technical experts in the areas of agriculture, health, and sanitation in an effort “to get behind Liberia as much as it is deemed expedient by all parties concerned.” He also promised to fund a geological survey of the republic so Liberia would “know as soon as possible what are its natural resources.” And on the same day, the State Department issued a press release extolling Liberia’s balanced budget, increase in revenues, and major appropriations for road building, sanitation, education, and radio communications.39 Walton also attributed some of the Liberian success story to the presence and expansion of Firestone’s enterprise, which may have persuaded the Rubber Baron to underwrite Liberia’s exhibit at the New York World’s Fair.40 Thus, even before Liberia assumed strategic signiﬁcance to U.S. war planners, it was being seen in a new light, thanks to Walton’s efforts. In one sense, this media blitz of snapshots, newsreels, and press releases is little more than what we would now call spin. After all, when budgets and revenues are small to begin with, a large percentage increase does not alter the small numbers in absolute terms. But Walton’s spin had palpable effects that drew economic developers like bees to honey. U.S. Steel sought

38. Walton to Wallace Murray, May 13, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 5/1938. Other exchanges between Walton and the State Department on this interview include Walton to Harry McBride, April 24, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 3–4/1938; Wallace Murray to Walton, May 3, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 5/1938; and Wallace Murray to Walton, May 16, 1938, NARA, 882.00/1068. 39. Walton to Edwin Barclay, February 10, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle January– February 1938; Walton to Barnett, February 10, 1938, and the press release, February 9, 1938, both in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938. 40. For examples of Walton’s promoting Firestone, see the press release, February 9, 1938, in CABPA, box 188, ﬁle Lester Walton, 1935–1938; and Walton to secretary of state, April 28, 1937, NARA, 882.00/1055. On Firestone’s support of Liberia at the world’s fair, see Walton to Harry McBride, May 6, 1938, and May 15, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle Corr. 5/1938.

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access to Liberia’s iron ore deposits. The Cavalla River Trading Company, a subsidiary of Lever Brothers, wanted palm oil and gordi beans for soap. Roscoe Conking Bruce, president of the Dunbar National Bank and a prominent African American businessman in New York, offered to sell Liberian coffee, cocoa beans, and hardwoods for a mere 5 percent commission on the gross. Walton himself sent samples of native Liberian textiles to John Wanamaker, Incorporated, to see if they had market potential in the United States in response to a request from one of the company’s New York managers, who wanted wide widths in “gay colors.” And in spite of his desire to deter the Barclay administration from developing diamond mines—believing that the traditional culture of the interior revolved around agriculture, not mining—Walton did, later, help his old friend Herbert Bayard Swope and interested investors explore the possibility of exploiting this extremely valuable mineral.41 In short, Walton’s actions on behalf of the United States, Firestone Rubber Company, and Liberia cannot be readily distinguished from those of noted white American statesmen and diplomats recognized as architects of a global capitalist economy. If not the architect, Walton certainly followed the specs and built according to a plan that was meant to bolster capitalism and democracy. In this work, Walton was no more accurate than others who represented Liberia to the world. When Du Bois, recalling his ﬁrst visit to Liberia, described a small village of the Veys as “still, clean, restrained, tiny, complete” and the people as having “leisure for thought and courtesy, leisure for sleep and laughter,” he was dissembling no more than Schuyler, who fumed about the rats, disorder, and sloth in the republic’s capital, or Graham Greene, who lamented the “stunted settlements along the coast, the grassy streets, the follies of the rocky hillside, the pathos of a black people planted down, without money or a home, on a coast of yellow fever and malaria to make what they can of an Africa from which their families have been torn

41. On U.S. Steel, see Harry McBride to Walton, April 7, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle March–April 1938; Walton to Jackson Davis, August 5, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle August 1938; and Walton to Edwin Barclay, February 10, 1938, LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle January– February 1938. On the Cavalla River Trading Company, see Walton to Harry A. McBride, June 1, 1936, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 6. For Roscoe Conkling Bruce’s interest in selling Liberian products, see Bruce to Walton, October 24, 1938, and Walton to Bruce, December 5, 1938, both, in spite of the discrepancy, in LAWPA, box 9, ﬁle October 1938. For Walton’s efforts on behalf of Swope’s interest in diamonds see Walton to George Padmore, November 4, 1954, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 13; Walton to Swope, January 29, 1955; Swope to Walton, January 26, 1955, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 14; and Swope to Walton, October 3, 1955, and October 24, 1955, LAWPA, box 21, ﬁle 16. On Walton’s contact with John Wanamaker, Inc., see William Schultz to Walton, January 17, 1938, and Henry A. Gemayel to Walton, March 26, 1938, LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 13.

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centuries before.”42 Diedrich Westermann, a German anthropologist, carefully recorded dozens of folktales and the customs of the Kpelle in the early 1920s, hoping to preserve the memory of “primitive” people destined, surely, for more modern ways.43 Walton conveyed policies that brought positive results, people looking for the main chance, and a nation eager for modern sanitation, education, health care, and social harmony. The coexistence of clean streets and urban chaos, contented villagers and dishonest politicians, primitive tribal folkways and the eager pursuit of progress speaks only to the irreducible complexity of any society. Observers turn their attention to this scene, not that; they record what they’re predisposed to see or what they need to ﬁnd in order to make a point. The chief difference between Walton and these other writers is that many of his observations were never connected to his name. Du Bois’s word picture appeared in an autobiography, Schuyler’s in a respected periodical and in a novel, Greene’s in a travel journal, and Westermann’s in a scholarly tome. Readers could accept or reject each man’s comments on any number of grounds. But the unattributed press release makes its way into newspapers and into consciousness often without those individual markers that allow readers to assess what claims represent. The power of culture in the media-dominated twentieth-century United States can’t be overestimated. Unless critically engaged, so-called objective journalism imprints images and impressions on those who consume them and then, based on those perceptions, make judgments about waging war, supporting foreign aid packages, investing, or characterizing an entire population as industrious or lazy, allies or terrorists. Rarely, however, do we consider seriously how “news” comes to be—who writes what appears in print and why. Walton may well have helped unleash the evils that would tear the republic apart in the decades after his death. The economic woes and social divisions that emerged in the late twentieth century with the reduced signiﬁcance of Firestone’s plantations (the development of synthetic rubber during and after World War II diminished the demand for natural latex) and the large-scale demand for cheap diamonds could be attributed to the whims of American capitalists and consumers for whose needs and desires Walton spoke. But I think such an assessment would miss a much more interesting and complex outcome of Walton’s eleven years in Liberia. For

42. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 126, 127; and Greene, Journey without Maps, 287– 88. 43. Diedrich Westermann, Die Kpelle, ein negerstamm in Liberia.

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however subtle it may have been, there was a difference in Walton’s representation of Liberia and in his vision of advancing the interests of his native land and of a country on the continent of his ancestors. Walton helped Liberians protect their sovereignty when it was most vulnerable, he cast Liberia’s successful governance as an example of the capacity of black people to take part in democracy, and he took part in postwar pan-African conferences that were designed to advance and protect the interests of people of color through racial solidarity and transnational collectivity. I don’t want to overemphasize Walton’s role in pan-Africanism. Such an emphasis would come at the expense of a rich story, recently told so well by Nikhil Pal Singh, about the courageous and radical organizing efforts of men and women who challenged the meaning and structure of democracy in the modern world.44 As Singh shows, that story has already been suppressed and forgotten in favor of a less radical narrative of the struggle for civil rights. Moreover, the truth of the matter is that Walton was not a leader or organizer of such transnational movements and feared the potentially destructive consequences of revolutionary social change. But he did believe in democracy and wanted to foster an attitude of respect toward all people. So, while he will never be included in the history of pan-Africanism, except as a fringe ﬁgure, I think it should be noted that his contribution was to instill a different consciousness of Africans as people with culture, political aspirations, and an autonomous will—a consciousness that had to be in place before radical political movements could even be imagined. As director of the NAACP’s Department of Special Research on Color and Democracy, Colonies and Peace, Du Bois asked to meet with Walton shortly after his retirement from the post in Monrovia to discuss plans for a pan-African exposition scheduled to coincide with the United Nations assembly in September 1946. The aim of the exposition was to seek “a way by which the people of Africa may be represented in the United Nations Assembly, at least as observers, if not participants.”45 Walton did meet with his old friend, but I don’t know if he actually attended the exposition— the letter suggesting they have lunch was personal; the letter outlining the aims of the exposition was one sent to dozens of interested people. Walton may well have attended the UN meeting, and in 1949 actually served as an advisor to the delegation representing Liberia in that body.46 But even as 44. Singh, Black Is a Country. 45. Du Bois to Walton, June 17, 1946, and July 24, 1946, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 13. 46. C. L. Simpson to Walton, January 8, 1949, and William E. Foley to Walton, May 24, 1949, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 33.

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he was learning more about the pan-African movement from Du Bois, Walton continued with his own agenda for advancing what he perceived to be the interests of African people. He used his status as a former U.S. minister to speak authoritatively with journalists about the need to write about Africa with respect and with attention to the successes as well as the problems. Walton pressed such stories into the hands of people like the general editor of the Associated Press, M. J. Wing, as “a valuable contribution to interracial understanding,” as a way to help “white Americans . . . form a higher appreciation of and greater respect for colored Americans,” and as “an inspiration to members of the race.”47 And he hired a public relations specialist, Ernest E. Johnson, to help him organize a luncheon for twelve prominent African American editors in June 1946, where he laid out background information on U.S.–Liberian relations and entertained questions and comments from the group. As Johnson noted in his summary of the event, Walton had confronted major misunderstandings about Liberia and encountered a willingness to learn more about the country in order to include news stories in their papers.48 Walton was not in the vanguard of pan-Africanism, but like the artists and entertainers who traveled overseas under the auspices of the USIA as token examples of racial equality in the United States and as informal ambassadors of democracy, he had developed informal ties with people in Africa. He knew Liberia ﬁrsthand and had made a point of learning about the diverse people who lived within the republic’s borders. And he recognized the legitimacy of their political hopes. These he represented as a celebrant, in a role that virtually guaranteed his anonymity. Ever the master media magician, Walton conjured an image of Liberia that for a time instilled conﬁdence in policymakers, investors, and philanthropists. Walton had mastered the art of representation—in all of its rich meanings— but he’s been forgotten nonetheless, and discovering him is a haunting reminder of the occluded vision with which most of us act.

47. Walton to Wing, July 22, 1947, LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 30. 48. See correspondence between Ernest E. Johnson and Walton in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 16.

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The stories I remember of Walton’s experience as a race man show him at his best as a person coming to terms with his complexities. He resisted, then embraced, a deﬁnitive racial identity but forever forged friendships and alliances on both sides of the color line based on shared interests and common goals rather than on race. His forbearance in the face of indignities that, in a racist society, were routinely and indifferently heaped on people of color should not be mistaken for a sign of weakness, although I suspect it was by both some contemporaries and those who came later. Walton’s desire to work tirelessly to help fashion a world that he wanted to inhabit and his ability to resist the urge to lash out against his colleagues in the State Department or his editors at the St. Louis Star point to a faith in political and cultural processes. The system, based as it was on ideals of equal rights and justice for all that had yet to be lived, was designed to produce just results. This he believed. And that faith in politics, which, in contrast to a pervasive cynicism in recent decades, led to action and optimism, distinguishes his outrage from what Christopher Lasch called narcissistic rage.1 Walton kept his memories green, for the past reminded him of the people and experiences that gave meaning to his life, but in his professional endeavors he kept his eye on the future, when his hopes for full citizenship and the end of Jim Crow would be realized. Race men like Walton had to believe that political acts inspired by outrage would lead to social and cultural change. 1. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations.

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At the same time, however, some aspects of the past were painful—too painful to revisit directly and publicly. They, too, remained green in his memory, and Walton patrolled them vigilantly. Nevertheless, memories of slavery, violence, and dispossession were wily and sneaked into Walton’s consciousness and leaked onto pages devoted to analysis of current social conditions. In the guise of commentary on events of the day, Walton’s memories of slavery escaped the quarantine he had imposed on them. That he meant to keep racial slavery at bay and it found an outlet in his writing anyway suggests the presence of trauma. Walton did not wish to confront what slavery had meant to his loved ones; perhaps he could not confront it because it had been so forcibly suppressed. But in various forms of reenactment, Walton gave vent to repressed pain in secondhand ways that psychologically he could not in a ﬁrsthand direct way. Remembering Walton requires a closer examination of these reenactments. I want to distinguish here two kinds of reenactment, both of which betray the simultaneous allure and inaccessibility of the past. The ﬁrst, historical reenactors, who don the dress and assume the identities of people from a bygone era and relive episodes—often battles—of the past, are ubiquitous in the United States. Many communities boast of groups or societies devoted to regular reenactments of Civil War battles, performances that require immersion in documents that describe the action— who led, which ﬂanks held or collapsed, what tactics were employed, how many perished or were wounded, and who won. They require as well deep knowledge of uniforms, insignia, weaponry, and technology, for the goal is to recreate “authentic” scenarios. Some who become involved in these performances may do so as a hobby or as an enjoyable opportunity to take part with friends in a spectacle that permits playacting and dressing up in a costume. But many of the historical reenactors I know have a deep respect for and obsessive interest in history. They not only want to experience what it was like to ﬁght or live under conditions very different from our own, but they also seek to inspire in their audiences a similar regard for the truths embedded in the past. The obsession with weekend performances or annual reenactments in conjunction with community festivals, however, suggests at best a partial fulﬁllment of the desire to return to the past. Once is not enough. There is some essence, it seems, that cannot be recaptured no matter how authentic the costume, how accurate the props, or how often one returns to the battleﬁeld. The other kind of reenactment is usually personal, private, and unacknowledged. It is the product of personal pain or witness to a loved one’s anguish that has been forced underground. The reenactment often occurs against one’s will and without one’s awareness. It is a symbolic rather than

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purposeful performance, and it surfaces in unexpected places like art, habits of speech, or professional work. These are the “unclaimed experiences” of which Cathy Caruth has written. They are, she insists, the raw “wounds of the mind” that have shaped individuals in ways they cannot fully acknowledge, and the wounds resist healing precisely because they cannot be examined, discussed, analyzed, and overcome in fully conscious ways.2 In the United States the greatest traumas of the body politic have occurred because of practices that run counter to stated ideals. Indianremoval policies of the 1830s and Indian Wars from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, enslavement of Africans and their American-born descendants, conﬂict between capital and labor, the fratricidal war of the 1860s, and persistent violence against minorities are all products of social inequalities that were susceptible to racialization. Ofﬁcially, Americans have found other ways to talk about these violent encounters—the triumph of civilization, Manifest Destiny, or modernization, for instance. Interestingly, both forms of reenactment have radiated from these traumatic events. Ofﬁcial history bypasses the ugly truths about which legions of men and women are obsessed, consciously and unconsciously. No wonder then that it is impossible to come to terms with the legacies of the most troubling aspects of the past—meaning that discussions of reparations for slavery or Native American land rights are met with sneers and impatience and that gross inequities in the distribution of wealth are explained away by social Darwinism or left to fester as the “hidden injuries of class.” As I have come to know Walton over the years, I have developed a deep regard for his desire to remain focused on the future, to refuse to dwell on the unpleasantness of the past, and to devise one strategy after another to make his native land a place of inclusion, a land of free people, and a home of those brave enough to do the right thing. When I ﬁrst encountered him, I could never have guessed the secrets he sought so diligently to hide. But as I remember him now, I realize how important reenactment was to his formation, how powerfully it propelled his work and how much his obsessive, though often unwitting, return to his family’s traumas can tell us about the pathology of racism in the twentieth century. Telling Walton’s story has required, so far, exposing Americans’ refusal to live up to their highest ideals. Even as they trumpeted merit and upward mobility as hallmarks of American culture they denied Walton and other African Americans credit for meritorious achievement and barred the path to material wealth. When the nation adopted a pledge of 2. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, 1–9.

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allegiance in the 1890s, promising “liberty and justice for all,” it simultaneously imposed segregation and condoned extralegal violence against African Americans, denying both liberty and justice to one tenth of its citizenry. The stories that circulated about the nation’s rise to international power and inﬂuence and its status as the font of democracy in a wartorn world relied in part on the masterful skills of mass media experts like Walton, but they also purposefully refused to acknowledge his contributions. Telling Walton’s story exposes America’s less-than-admirable practices, policies, and actions at home and abroad throughout the twentieth century. Walton’s ghost lurks as a haunting reminder that if we seek a deep understanding of the sources of social discontent and simmering interracial conﬂict, we have to confront the ugly and the painful truths of our collective past along with the glorious history we prefer. In many ways, Walton conspired to keep parts of this past hidden, and that, too makes him a haunting ﬁgure. How tragic it is that he had to conceal certain aspects of his personal history and his family’s experience in America! The stories he couldn’t bring himself to tell do not reﬂect on his or his forebears’ shortcomings or failures, but they do cast grim shadows on the institutions and creeds with which Walton chose to ally himself. Ultimately, this is the reason we need to remember Walton. Finding those subjects that he could not directly address but that nevertheless surfaced in his writing in coded ways helps us ﬁnally to discern the incommensurable relationship between memory and history—between our allegiance to self-knowledge and externally imposed identity. As a journalist, Walton availed himself of numerous opportunities to comment on contemporary social relations. In St. Louis, he was a selfappointed liaison between the African American community and white readers of the Star. When Herbert Bayard Swope hired him to write for the New York World, reporting on the doings of black Harlem constituted his job description. In both cases, his private memories served as a lens through which he viewed and evaluated events in the two cities, and with the imprimatur of the Star and the World, Walton brought his haunted perspective to white readers. The reports themselves are intriguing in their own right; when read alongside Walton’s history and private stash of memory and information, they represent a surface that was deceptive, allowing only ﬂeeting glimpses of what’s beneath.

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Chapter 12 Escape of the Kaffirs

Walton remembered the summer of 1904, when the Louisiana Purchase Exposition opened in St. Louis, as a time when “hundreds of dark-skinned people came to this country,” making it “even more perplexing to the white citizens to make the racial distinctions along their peculiar lines.”1 Anthropological exhibits placed on display colored people from around the world caught in the tangled web of Western imperialism, and their variegated hues, Walton believed, disturbed the dominant American view of a simple division of humanity along race lines. If whites in St. Louis left the fair confused about race, many African Americans who commented on the fair betrayed their own blind spots on racial classiﬁcation. Emmett Scott, an emissary from the Voice of the Negro, reported that “a ‘Pike’ concession, ‘A Southern Plantation,’ showing Negro life before the War of the Rebellion, is all there is to let the world know we are in existence, aside from a small exhibit from a Mississippi College, and one or two other exhibits of no very particular moment.”2 Neither he, W. S. Scarborough, nor any of the many writers who discussed the exotic exhibits of Igorots or Pygmies made any mention of an installation of Africans that accompanied one of the most popular concessions at the fair, the Boer War Camp.

1. “When Is a Negro a Negro?” New York Age, April 22, 1909, 6, col. 1–2. 2. Scott, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 310.

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The main feature of the camp was a twice-daily reenactment of famous battles from the War between British forces and Dutch Boers in southern Africa that had ended in British victory scarcely two years before the opening of the world’s fair in St. Louis. Calling their program “The Greatest and Most Realistic Military Spectacle Known in the History of the World,” British and Boer veterans had organized the reenactments, which were performed by hundreds of men who had fought in the original battles. Among the notable participants were Gen. Benjamin Johannes Viljoen, second in command of the Boer forces, whose reminiscences framed the “libretto” of the performance, and Capt. S. H. Chapin, who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order, or DSO, for valor in the ﬁeld. Although the spectacle likely would have ﬁt in nicely with the oddities and entertainments featured on the Pike, the Boer War Camp occupied a separate space in which a grandstand and arena had been constructed to stage the battles and that exhibited as well the dozens of African natives who had been brought along to authenticate the setting. The ofﬁcial program was actually quite stylized and choreographed for the artiﬁcial stage of the arena. A Boer lecturer, Capt. Peter James Visser, opened each show by introducing the members of the South African Boer War Exhibition Company and informing the audience that “all persons taking part in this military display, 600 in all, are men and women brought from various and distant parts of South Africa. Each and every one has taken a most active part in the late Anglo-Boer War.” The stage directions invited spectators to imagine an “African Landscape” in the “Early Morn,” and the cover of the ofﬁcial program pictured mounted Boers charging across the grassy hills of southern Africa toward a British encampment in the distance. What those sitting in the bleachers and grandstands of the arena actually saw was a ﬂat, open ﬁeld, fenced in on all sides with the ferris wheel and rooftops of the ofﬁcial exhibition halls on the fairgrounds peeking over the wall. After the introductions were made, the audience witnessed a “Sword Exercise” by New South Wales lancers, a review of the Transvaal Staats Artillery, and a series of races, the outcomes of which were the only unknowns on the program. Then came the battle reenactments—the Battle of Colenso, the Battle of Paardeberg, and De Wets Escape.3 A young visitor to the camp remembered in later years that “the Boer War was fought twice a day” that summer in St. Louis, and for the caption of the photograph she selected to illustrate her memory of the fair, 3. Ofﬁcial Program, Anglo-Boer War, Historical Libretto (St. Louis: J. F. Hilton, 1904) located in the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri. The pages are not numbered.

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she wrote: “After the ‘Boer War,’ the ‘dead and dying’ would get up from the battleﬁeld, throw their arms around each other and walk off the battleﬁeld, only to return later and ﬁght the war all over again.”4 So although the performers were all veterans, they could not all assume their own identities. Some had to “die.” Daily reenactments of the Anglo-Boer War ofﬁcially began on June 17, 1904, but days before the opening performance, the Africans made the news. Company organizers had arrived in January to make preparations for the fair. In addition to the arena, they installed exhibitions of “South African curios” and villages of various southern African tribes, which the ofﬁcial historians of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition described as “a strange and interesting aggregation.”5 On June 1, 1904, the St. Louis GlobeDemocrat reported that “ten negroes who came to St. Louis with the South African Boer War exhibition company were arrested at Nineteenth and Market Streets last night on suspicion of being runaways.” Two days earlier, camp managers had contacted the St. Louis Police Department to request help in locating twelve men “who, it was stated, had escaped.” The Africans insisted that they were in the Gateway City for a “shopping tour” and protested their arrest, but they were placed behind bars nonetheless. The next day some kind of fracas ensued when Capt. Arthur Waldo Lewis, the chief organizer of the Boer War exhibition, and a contingent of Boer soldiers arrived at the station to claim the “fugitives.” The Africans did not willingly return to the fairgrounds and devised an ingenious ruse to buy some time. Although Captain Lewis prodded them along with the threat of force, they asked for, and were grudgingly granted, time to retrieve clothing they had abandoned in their hiding places. Several then tried to make a break, and in the excitement, African Americans in the neighborhood joined the fray. Willietha Smith, described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a “Black Amazon,” led the charge in defense of the Kafﬁrs. One of the Boer ofﬁcers delivered a stunning blow to her eye; William Smith, William Mayberry, and John A. McCullagh, other African Americans on the scene, were arrested along with Mrs. Smith as they tried to assist the Africans in their getaway. Lewis and his men, somewhat intimidated by the Kafﬁrs, panicked and placed a riot call to the precinct, which brought every available ofﬁcer to the scene. Meanwhile dozens of black St. Louisans began to gather on the street, and in all of the confusion ﬁve

4. Dorothy Daniels Birk, The World Came to St. Louis: A Visit to the 1904 World’s Fair, 56, 54. 5. Mark Bennitt and Frank Parker Stockbridge, eds., History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 714–15.

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Africans succeeded in escaping. With the help of St. Louis policemen, the Boers and Captain Lewis managed to regain control of the rest of the Kafﬁrs, who were “returned to the Fair grounds under heavy guard.”6 Reports of the escape varied from one newspaper to another and from day to day. It is not clear, for example, how many Africans—some said as few as ten, others as many as sixteen—tried to leave the camp, although all the accounts agreed that ﬁve never returned. Reporters also disagreed on the role played by local African Americans in the events of late May and early June, although it is clear they participated at various stages of the Africans’ adventure. The most prominent African American newspaper, the Palladium, disputed the claim that a riot occurred outside the police precinct by publishing a letter to the editor from someone who was there. “As to there being a mob of Negroes,” the eyewitness wrote, “[that] is a misrepresentation.”7 But the only reason given for the Kafﬁrs’ desire to leave the fair was that “they had not been paid according to contract,” as the Post-Dispatch reported. The Palladium put the point bluntly: “Those Africans were promised $4 per day and received ‘nit.’” The editor’s sarcastic poem, composed for the occasion, read: To serve the present age, Our pockets we must ﬁll, We’ll make them work for wages, And never pay the bill. He further editorialized: “The minister who preaches to his congregation that they ought to make [sic] up collections for foreign missions and refuse to help his brethren recently from Africa, in distress, is only a hireling, and careth not for others.”8 By all accounts, the Kafﬁrs’ great escape had caused quite a stir in the days preceding Scott’s and Scarborough’s visits to the fair. Walton covered the story for the Star, and his report contained many of the same details that appeared in the Post-Dispatch, the Globe-Democrat, and the Palladium. But his analysis of those details bears the marks of a kind of painful reenactment. Beginning with the headline—“African War Renewed by Kafﬁrs, Boers”—Walton’s account of these events betrays his

6. “South African Negroes Held,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 1, 1904, 4, col. 2; “Boers and Kafﬁrs in a Street Fight,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 2, 1904, 1, col. 3; and “Black Amazon to Rescue of Kafﬁrs,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 2, 1904, 1, col. 1. 7. “Brighton Items,” St. Louis Palladium, June 11, 1904, 1, col. 4. 8. “Black Amazon to Rescue of Kafﬁrs”; “Brighton Items.”

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interpretation of the Africans’ ﬂight as a reliving of recent episodes of black-white conﬂict. Apparently neither the Post-Dispatch nor the GlobeDemocrat sought an explanation for why the Africans had been arrested in a black neighborhood, but Walton’s report made it clear. “The negroes had visited their untutored brethren in their huts and kraals in the Boer War camp,” he wrote. “They learned that they were being held as prisoners. They thought that if they assisted their South African relations to escape they would only be exemplifying the doctrine of the emancipation proclamation.” Walton’s perspective, shaped by the experiences of former slaves, cast the drama of the Kafﬁrs as a reenactment of two wars—the Anglo-Boer War, just ended, and the U.S. Civil War of recent memory. As presented in the Boer War Camp, the Anglo-Boer War was a white man’s ﬁght that just happened to be acted out in the midst of Africans, but Walton’s headline recognized that the war in southern Africa had affected native Africans as profoundly as it had the European colonizers squabbling over who would dominate the region. Moreover, in the United States, had not the war between the states taken on new meaning after Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863? The implicit message in Walton’s article is that the black St. Louisans’ visit to the African exhibit at the Boer War Camp had stirred in them memories of their own struggle to escape oppression, and they felt compelled to aid the Kafﬁrs in their ﬂight. The escapees ended up in a jail in a black neighborhood (indeed, just a few blocks from Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Cafe), because American Negroes had encouraged their leaving by offering places to hide, food to eat, and jobs that would allow them to support themselves independently. Walton’s article alone revealed that the runaways were harbored, in short, in the black community of St. Louis. Walton went on to insist that African Americans “in the vicinity of the Seventh District Police Station are very much excited over the holding in bondage of their African brethren by the Boer War concession, and another attempt at their liberation would not be unexpected.” His framing of this story in the terms of “emancipation proclamation,” “bondage,” and “liberation,” suggests that the entire affair had resonated for him as a modernday replaying of the war that set his own ancestors free but whose ideals of freedom, equal protection under the law, and citizenship had been betrayed in the ensuing decades. He ended the article on an ominous note: “The Boer ofﬁcer state[s], however, that hereafter the savages will be constantly under heavy armed guard, both night and day.” The end of the Civil War in the United States had not brought an end to the oppression of African Americans nor had the Boer War served the interests of the Kafﬁrs. The fact that the Kafﬁrs could be seen as “brethren”—a term used

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twice and synonymously with “relations”—made their struggle for freedom personal for African Americans in St. Louis.9 Though four decades in the past, the Civil War lived on in the memories of St. Louis Negroes. Even for those like Walton—born in the aftermath of Reconstruction—slavery, war, and broken promises colored their view of the world. Although the writers for the Voice of the Negro ignored the plight of the Africans held hostage in the Boer War Camp, they recognized that a fair devoted to exalting the progress made in the United States since the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory had unfairly erased African American contributions to developing the land, cultivating, harvesting, and loading cotton onto steamships, and thus fueling national and international market exchange. And what about the lively, syncopated melodies that delighted white crowds on the fairgrounds—weren’t many of them composed and performed by musicians like Joplin, Patterson, and Turpin? Was it a mere coincidence that in early June the exposition managers decided to crack down on concessionaires who discriminated against African Americans who came to the fair? Scott asserted that “so intense became the proscription to which I have referred, that it became necessary for the Exposition management to issue an ofﬁcial, or semi-ofﬁcial, statement deﬁning its position and its relation to the concessionaires.”10 Scott, of course, focused his concern on the extent to which African Americans should support a fair that rendered them and their ancestors invisible, but even he recognized that something had happened in early June. Walton, who covered the incident, used the story of the Kafﬁrs to suggest to his largely white readership the parallels that might be drawn between the U.S. Civil War and the Anglo-Boer War. That the two conﬂicts were comparable was not lost on white impresarios of the fair, but the linkages they identiﬁed differed considerably from those implied by Walton. The ofﬁcial program of the reenactment, for instance, devoted a full page to General Viljoen’s recently published historical novel, Under the Vierkleur, and offered excerpts of reviews that showed it was “enthusiastically endorsed by the press” in the United States. The principal reason for the novel’s greatness appears to have been that Viljoen had made a romance out of military defeat and had found ways to praise and reconcile with his erstwhile foes. The New York Tribune appreciated the Boer general’s ability to conjure “a feeling of keen sympathy for the conquered Boers and of admiration for their sterling qualities.” A story “without rancor” and “not a tirade against the conquerors,” Under 9. “African War Renewed by Kafﬁrs, Boers,” St. Louis Star, June 2, 1904, 6, col. 6–7. 10. Scott, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 311.

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the Vierkleur offered a ﬁrsthand glimpse of battles, “Boer commando life,” and the “pastoral life of the Boers,” a way of life they wanted only to defend. The similarities between the defeated Boers and the Confederates were most succinctly expressed by the Press in New York: “A soldier’s story of a lost cause is what General Viljoen has told in his novel. It is a stirring tale as good soldiers’ stories are apt to be and is marked by a good soldier’s toleration for his enemies. The author is a good loser, this is the best story of the season for young men especially.” Later, the program advised visitors: “After enjoying the Boer War Exhibit pay a visit to the Old Virginia Homestead, situated 100 yards east of Main Entrance to Boer War Exhibit, directly opposite the Tennessee and Virginia State Buildings.” Although the “old homestead” purported to be a replica of a “rural Virginia home, duplicated in every detail, just as it existed a century ago,” the description said not a word about slavery. The twinning of southern Africa in 1904 and Virginia in 1804 depended on shared defeat, reconciliation of former enemies, and the romanticization of the pastoral life, which, in reality, could not have existed in either place without oppressed men and women of color.11 Walton and other African Americans who were drawn into the drama of the Kafﬁrs turned attention away from the willingness of former white foes to kiss and make up and toward the broken promises of freedom and equality, and, undoubtedly, toward unspoken memories of lives forever marked by racial oppression. The Negro experience of these two conﬂicts, now blithely effaced by the white combatants, made them considerably more than white men’s wars. Walton knew what had preceded and followed the Emancipation Proclamation in his family—a Madagascar family torn asunder by the slave trade, his mother’s ﬂight from Shawneetown, loss of land in Tennessee, and a gnarled white branch of the family tree, never pruned but bearing fruit that was alien to the Streets, Campers, Browns, and Waltons. If the Waltons’ neighbors on Cottage Avenue were typical of African Americans in the city, they, too, remembered experiences of dislocation, experiences recorded unconsciously by the census-taker’s hand in 1900. Parents and children born in different states, separated by great distances—like 103-year-old Rosetta Henry from North Carolina and her daughter Mary E. Johnson, born in Mississippi, or ﬁfty-four-year-old Ester Perkins, born in Missouri, and her daughter Fannie B. Cole, born in Mississippi. Richard Taite, a sixty-year-old widower from Virginia, could 11. Ofﬁcial Program, Missouri Historical Society. The pages of this program are not numbered, but praise for Under the Vierkleur inside the cover, and the advertisement for the Old Virginia Homestead is located nine pages later.

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not say for sure where his parents had been born; he now lived with his four children, two of whom had been born in Pennsylvania, two in Missouri, and Tennessee-born John Oden and his Pennsylvania-born wife, Anna.12 Mechanical answers to routine questions allude to separation, movement across far distances, and black people helping one another cope with both slavery and freedom. African Americans probably assessed the plight of the Africans in the terms of U.S. slavery and civil war, because when they visited the Boer War exhibit they were able to conﬁrm a view widely held during the Anglo-Boer Conﬂict that the Boers most resembled unreconstructed southerners in their attitudes toward and treatment of native Africans. Accounts from American Negro travelers in South Africa before and during the conﬂict impressed on African American readers the similarities between Boers and Confederates. Black Republicans in the election of 1900 compared Boers to southern Democrats as “virulent racists” and, in the words of black journalist Edward E. Bruce, “a set of psalm-singing, ‘nigger’ hating hypocrites.” When the governor of Alabama publicly invited Boers into his state in the event that they were defeated by the British, T. Thomas Fortune declared caustically that the South already was home to “too many Boers.” African American newspapers published articles, based partly on eyewitness accounts of African American travelers and partly on British propaganda, that described the utter contempt in which Boers held native Africans: Africans were constitutionally denied citizenship, equal treatment, and the vote; they were subjected to both violence and dispossession. Although initially indifferent to the outcome of a “white man’s war” and in some corners sympathetic to the Boer resistance to British domination, most African Americans eventually assumed a strong anti-Boer position, because they saw in the Boers enemies something akin to former slave owners in the South.13 Perhaps that consciousness of shared oppression is what prompted Willietha Smith to shout at Capt. Arthur W. Lewis, “You dirty bloody Boer, you ought to be dead,” not recognizing that the captain was a British, not a Boer, ofﬁcer.14

12. 1900 Federal Census, St. Louis City, Ward 26, sheet 59A, is the location of the Benjamin Walton family at 4265 Cottage Avenue. Perkins and Cole lived at 4281 Cottage Avenue; the Johnsons and Rosetta Henry at 4283, and the Odens and Taites at 4259. The enumerator, Charles E. Randals, did a particularly commendable job of recording the street address for each household along Cottage Avenue, so one can symbolically walk down the street on either side of the Waltons and learn a great deal about their neighbors. 13. Willard B. Gatewood Jr., “Black Americans and the Boer War, 1899–1902,” 226–44. 14. “Black Amazon to Rescue of Kafﬁrs.”

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British victory over the Boers in 1902 had not brought maltreatment of the natives to an end. Indeed, in July 1900, H. Sylvester Williams, a West Indian lawyer, and Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church organized the ﬁrst pan-African conference in London, which resulted in a memorial sent to Queen Victoria protesting the treatment of Africans in South Africa and Rhodesia. In spite of the British promise to attend to the interests of natives in the region, the new constitution maintained the racial segregation upheld by the Boers and kept in place for more than a decade a statute that forbade Africans to share the sidewalks with Englishmen. One of the participants in the London conference, W. E. B. Du Bois, drafted a separate memorial in his capacity as chair of the Committee on Address to the Nations of the World in which he declared, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the color line,” a phrase more often associated with his Souls of Black Folk (1903) and assumed, erroneously, to register concern exclusively about race relations in the United States. From the dawn of the twentieth century, Du Bois, Walton, and others recognized that the struggle of African Americans in the United States was linked to the struggle of people of color around the world. And as the age of imperialism began to blossom for powerful Western nations like Great Britain and the United States, African Americans recognized the plight of Filipinos and South Africans as tied up inextricably with their own.15 It was in that spirit that Walton returned to the misfortunes of the captive Kafﬁrs more than two weeks after the attempted escape and after the other St. Louis dailies had lost interest in the story altogether. If it was not clear in his original story how the escape of the Kafﬁrs represented a “renewal” of the Anglo-Boer War, Walton’s interview with Um-Kalali left 15. For a discussion of the pan-African conference held in London, see George Shepperson, “Notes on Negro American Inﬂuences on the Emergence of African Nationalism,” 306–7. For an analysis of African American newspapermen’s writings about Africa on the eve of the Anglo-Boer War, which captures some of the ambivalence toward imperialism in general and the Boers in particular, see Walter L. Williams, “Black Journalism’s Opinions about Africa During the Late Nineteenth Century,” 224– 35. In this article, Williams examines the writings of black journalists in the context of ongoing debates about the relative merits of African Americans relocating to Africa to escape negative conditions in the United States. Many advised against migration because of a perception of the primitive way of life prevalent among African tribes. They thus favored imperialism and “civilization” brought to Africa by European powers. In “Black American Attitudes toward Africa, 1877–1900,” 173–94, Williams acknowledges that when the discussion turned away from the prospects for African American migration to Africa black writers registered greater concern about the domination of Black people by Europeans. For an example of ambivalence toward the Boers after the British were in control, see “Oom Paul Kruger,” 302–3.

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no doubt. Um-Kalali was a witch doctor, who, in a tradition that extended back for centuries, exerted considerable inﬂuence over the king of the Matabeles. King Lobengula had earned his position of leadership in 1870 through intratribal battles in which he had prevailed. Like his father, Lobengula kept the disintegrative effects of “civilization” at bay by curtailing Europeans’ access to tribal lands. But in the midst of what Peter Warwick has called a “mineral revolution” between 1870 and 1900, when both gold and diamonds were discovered in abundance, maintaining tribal sovereignty became increasingly perilous. The Matabeles’ foremost African rivals, the Zulus, were destroyed by the British in 1879; Basutoland came under British rule in the aftermath of the Gun War of 1880–1881. The discovery of gold in Witwatersrand in 1886 drew thousands of British miners and colonial ofﬁcials into southern Africa. It was in 1886, Um-Kalali insisted, that he persuaded King Lobengula to attack the British. He later incited the Kafﬁr Rebellion of 1898, an event recorded by modern history as taking place in 1896 against the Chartered Company.16 St. Louisans may have remembered that days before the onset of war between the British and the Boers, rumors of native uprisings were reported—“an organized attack upon the mines by natives and the destruction of the plants,” according to the St. Louis Republic. They might have been sporting jewelry from the Diamond Palace on Olive Street, a store that had invited shoppers to “join the great army” and “declare war on our entire stock of beautiful TRANSVAAL GEMS” on sale because of the impending war.17 It is unlikely, however, that the bargain hunters would have registered the misery of African miners, whose traditional way of life had been destroyed by the Western demand for those brilliant stones. An aspect of the reenactment of the war that remained invisible in all of the hoopla surrounding the pretend battles in the arena was, in fact, the “imprisoning” of the Africans put on display. Um-Kalali told Walton that he had been captured in 1899 by the British and “jailed” for three years.18 Jail may have been a euphemism for the concentration camps established by the British to keep native refugees and displaced people out of the war

16. Hugh Marshall Hole, The Passing of the Black Kings, 23. For information about Lobengula’s rule and the encroachment of Europeans, see Peter Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902, 6–9. 17. “Anarchy Threatens in the Transvaal: Natives and the Lawless Element May Attack the Mines—Boers and Britons on the Borders Cautious,” St. Louis Republic, October 10, 1899, 4, col. 4–5; half-page advertisement in St. Louis Republic, October 1, 1899, 2. 18. “Um-Kalali, Witch Doctor, King of Superstition,” St. Louis Star, June 19, 1904, 9, col. 1–2. The article is illustrated with a photograph of Um-Kalali.

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zones, a move justiﬁed at the time as a way of “protecting” the natives and recruiting laborers to assist the British army. Because of the British scorchedearth policy, which drastically reduced locally produced foodstuffs, Col. R. S. S. Baden-Powell cut rations for black Africans, distributing precious ﬂour and meal to whites, and doling out part of the horses’ rations of oats and grain to the blacks. British noncombatants recorded horriﬁc scenes in letters and private journals that testiﬁed to the privation of the natives— their exhuming buried animals, picking through the garbage heaps, and resorting to cannibalism. Baden-Powell’s response was to open “for-proﬁt” soup kitchens, which sold soup made from horse carcasses. Um-Kalali’s three-year term coincided with the duration of hostilities; after the war the British sent him into exile in Rhodesia, where he remained until he signed up with a recruiter hiring natives for the Boer War concession in St. Louis. As a known rebel, Um-Kalali had been banished by the British from his homeland, but life did not return to normal for other Africans at war’s end. Boers, with the assistance of the British military, forced squatters into tenancy and conﬁscated cattle that the Africans had found untended after the hasty Boer retreat. The British constitution denied blacks the franchise, which they had promised would be one of the reforms coming out of the war. Africans who returned to the mines, lacking other viable options for making a living, found that British mine owners reduced wages and regulated their labor even more closely than in the past. Broken promises, dispossession, economic dependence, and exile—these were the outcomes of the Anglo-Boer War for most native peoples.19 It was eight decades before Peter Warwick exposed this dark underside of the Anglo-Boer War. When it was still fresh in the memories of its participants—both African and European—the impresarios of reenactment pushed that aspect of the war to the side in favor of a more palatable and proﬁtable version that emphasized glory and honor, a “lost cause,” and the reconciliation of white combatants. Refracted through the African American experience of war, Um-Kalali’s story presented Walton and others in the black community of St. Louis an opportunity to reﬂect on the meaning of their own history and to cultivate an awareness of shared oppression based on race. Indeed, Walton’s interest in the southern Africans’ plight may have been sparked by a notice that appeared in the May/June 1903 issue of Colored American Magazine. An article by Walton on the future of black performers on the American stage was one of the features in this issue; a piece by

19. Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 35–37; 149–62; 164–78.

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A. Kirkland Soga entitled “Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century” appeared near the end. Soga’s article consists of a document submitted to Joseph Chamberlain, the English secretary of state for the Colonies, petitioning him to attend to the needs of the native people of South Africa. “Much as our people have suffered through the late war,” Soga wrote, “their conﬁdence in the justice of that war made them all the more willing to bear the hardships imposed upon them in common with the Mother Country.” He reminded Chamberlain of the native people’s loyalty and expressed gratitude for the protection, housing, and food provided in the concentration camps. Now, he was placing “the cause of the sufferers” in the hands of the “Imperial Government” in the hope that justice would be done.20 The escape of the Kafﬁrs in 1904 would have given Walton a chance to probe the polite language of the petition for undertones of the suffering of southern Africans that did not appear in ofﬁcial accounts of the war. When I think about Walton in the summer of 1904, I remember a man haunted by a past that was about to change the course of his life. Determined to succeed as a journalist on a white daily, Walton nevertheless chose subjects that had the potential to reveal some of his secrets. UmKalali’s story is one that he could have chosen, on professional grounds, to ignore—no one was thinking much about the Africans “under heavy armed guard, both night and day” at the Boer War Camp, installed next to the South African curio exhibit, except maybe those who understood something of what they had survived. But Walton could not pass up the opportunity to revisit his past by testifying to the travails of others. Although these articles represent a miniscule portion of his work as a journalist in St. Louis, the reports on the escape of the Kafﬁrs and Um-Kalali nevertheless are revealing, and they offer important ways to remember Walton, for they grant access to events of his life that would be considered, in strict chronological terms, over and done—yet they lived on. The articles also identify a key moment in Walton’s life when a transnational racial consciousness began to take form. Walton disturbs the peace of a society content to ignore the complexities of war, racial identity, and history. The episode also sharpens the distinction between the two kinds of reenactment I described at the beginning. The reliving of the battles of the Anglo-Boer War provided opportunities for former enemies to reconcile their differences and to emphasize their similarities—conviction, bravery, and whiteness—without having to consider what their struggle meant to men and women over whose land they fought. The same can be said for

20. A. Kirkland Soga, “Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century,” 432.

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most reenactments of U.S. Civil War battles. They train the eye on the details of troop movements, tactics, uniforms, weaponry, the blunders that led to defeat or the strokes of genius (or good fortune) that led to victory. But they rarely, if ever, consider the disastrous effects of slavery, the dislocations caused by conﬂict, the war’s shameful aftermath, and the unfair odds against African American success in a society where former combatants found ways to share the wages of white privilege.

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Chapter 13 Exodus

Walton obsessively revisited slavery, dispossession, and exodus again and again throughout his adult life, seeking some understanding but never letting on how profoundly personal these issues were to him. He was a man looking to go home but unsure where home was. He hung onto his parents’ property in Shawneetown for sentimental reasons, he said, but I doubt that he regarded it as a place to which he could retire. Shawneetown, like virtually every other place Walton and his family may have called home, carried with it memories of anxiety, not comfort. His great-grandmother came to America on a slave ship; his mother left Shawneetown in fear; his father left Arkansas, and apparently, he never returned; Walton exited St. Louis in disappointment. Walton found a room in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn upon his arrival in the unfamiliar city, but he never mentioned or corresponded with the collection of strangers who lived there. Toward the end of his life, he expressed interest in buying some property outside of New York City, where he would retire from the hustle and bustle of Harlem, and friends sent him brochures on exclusive housing developments for black professionals, which they urged him to consider. But he took no action. For the last forty years of his life, his principal address remained in the Dunbar Apartments on Seventh Avenue. Physically, he had a refuge, but he continued to search for a sense of belonging. The powerful combination of home and community puts his last professional position into perspective. It was a position Walton assumed at the 246

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age of seventy-six, a time in his life when he might have expected to watch with pride as his grandson and namesake, Lester Walton Rochester, grew into young manhood. But when he learned in 1955 that Mayor Robert Wagner and the city council were forming a Commission on Intergroup Relations to study “the problems of prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, discrimination, and disorder caused by intergroup tension,” Walton actively sought an appointment. The letter of recommendation from Herbert Bayard Swope, who served as the chair of the commission, probably clinched the job, but Walton’s qualiﬁcations and other strong advocates didn’t hurt. The ﬁrst couple of years the commission investigated charges of discrimination and conﬂicts among groups and individuals of different races and/or ethnic backgrounds. Not surprisingly, Walton chaired the Committee on Public Relations. After 1958, however, the work of the commission became more focused. With the passage of Local Law 80, the Fair Housing Practices Law, the city empowered the commission “to investigate and hold hearings on allegations of discrimination in private housing,” which, according to ofﬁcial history, was “the ﬁrst in the nation to extend protection against discrimination to private housing.”1 The hope was that the commission could mediate disputes, perhaps clear up misunderstandings, but when that failed, the commission could issue subpoenas, inspect pertinent documents, hold hearings, and recommend prosecution of wrongdoing. In other words, as a commissioner, Walton had the opportunity to insist that New Yorkers live up to the nation’s founding ideals and to help make the city home to all who lived there. I hoped that the municipal records housed in city hall would contain transcripts of the commission’s hearings—transcripts like the handful I had seen in Walton’s papers at the Schomburg. I was disappointed to ﬁnd only published records related to COIR—annual reports, copies of laws, and newsletters. The transcripts Walton saved, however, at least offer a glimpse of the commission’s work. They testify both to the direct challenges made by the three-member “Hearing Tribunals” and to the overwhelming scope of unfair housing practices in the city. To adjudicate one case at a time in a city where thousands of instances of discrimination occurred must have felt like bailing out the Atlantic Ocean with a thimble. One case in particular stands out, however. It took place in December 1961, and Walton was presiding. Allie Oulds, an African American woman,

1. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Commission Chair Marta Varela, NYC Commission on Human Relations, Annual Report 2001, 11. This and other annual reports are housed in municipal records in New York City Hall.

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tried to rent an apartment from Rita Haberman only to be told it was no longer available. A tenant in the building later told Oulds that Haberman did not rent units to Negroes, so Oulds ﬁled a complaint. At the hearing Walton was courteous but relentless, as the excerpt from the transcript reveals: LAW: How many apartments have you? RH: I guess about ﬁfty-four. LAW: Any colored? RH: No. LAW: Have you ever had any colored? RH: No. LAW: Why? RH: Look, it’s not—I mean, I could have once in a while an apartment. But then the tenants are taking care of their relatives. LAW: I see. Goldman [attorney for COIR]: Are there ﬁfty-ﬁve apartments in the building? RH: Yes, ﬁfty-four. LAW: And no colored? RH: No. LAW: And never any colored? RH: No, I don’t— LAW: How long have you had the property? RH: Twelve years. LAW: And no colored? RH: No. LAW: That doesn’t speak too good, does it?2

Over and over, Walton forced Haberman to admit her prejudice against people of color; her stammering replies indicate her level of discomfort. In this case and others, the commission extracted a promise from the landlord to mend his or her discriminatory ways. In another case, Wilhelmina Holliday sent a white friend, Sue Bishop, to see if she could get a unit at an apartment house administered by Weinreb Management after the African American woman had been told that the manager would get back to her. Bishop was offered the apartment on the spot even though her income was less than Holliday’s and there was supposedly only one unit available. Holliday believed she had been “denied

2. Miss Allie Oulds v. Rita Haberman, complaint H-941, ﬁled December 4, 1961, LAWPA, box 22, ﬁle 6.

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this housing accommodation” because of her race and ﬁled a complaint. This case, over which Walton again presided, ended when Weinreb promised the next vacant apartment to Holliday, a settlement that the complainant “found satisfactory.”3 One complaint at a time, the fourteen-member commission chipped away at the problem. Meanwhile explosive confrontations rocked the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and schools in Harlem burst at the seams with black children assigned to them because white school districts refused to accept them. And in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1954, the successful conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the tense scene at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the ﬁrst sit-ins at lunch counters with their searing images of nonviolent civil disobedience met with heavy-handed law enforcement, the historic New York City law demanding fair housing practices seems like a sideshow in the larger drama of the post–World War II civil rights movement. Martha Biondi barely acknowledges the commission—renamed the Commission on Human Rights in 1962—in her study of civil rights in New York in these years. Since governments had taken so long to act, and when they had acted had moved at a snail’s pace, it’s hard to gainsay the argument that the activists, marchers, and protesters were the front lines of the civil rights movement. The pressures that were building in the 1950s and 1960s and that eventually erupted in the highly visible struggle for ﬁrst-class citizenship were also encroaching on Walton’s refuge in the Dunbar Apartments. Walton complained to his daughter Gladys that neighborhood boys vandalized the outside of the apartment. His letter reminds me of Gregory Hines’s depiction of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of Walton’s neighbors and friends—the aging dancer, who had dazzled audiences for decades with his rhythmic moves—being hassled by neighborhood kids in the park. To them, he was just an old geezer. Did they regard Walton in the same way? A photograph of Walton with Abbie Mitchell and other retired actors from the 1910s and 1920s posed in front of the building in which Walton resided—the bas-relief above the entry hall and sculpted gardens well maintained—captures a moment in the life of Harlem after its Renaissance days and before its status declined to that of a decaying urban ghetto. The glory days, when occupants had to show sufﬁcient assets to get into one of the buildings constructed with Rockefeller money, were fading.

3. Wilhelmina Holliday v. Weinreb Management, complaint H-803, May 4, 1961, LAWPA, box 22, ﬁle 8.

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Through the 1950s, Walton did not shy away from the broad-based struggle, his position as a commissioner and his dismay notwithstanding. He contributed generously and fairly regularly to the NAACP, especially to the legal division, and he took part in beneﬁts to stir support for the movement. A ﬂyer for one such gala event remains among Walton’s papers. Oscar Hammerstein II and Lena Horne cochaired the Second Annual NAACP’s Great Night at Madison Square Garden on March 23, 1953. Ed Sullivan served as one of six masters of ceremonies, and the long, starstudded list of entertainers included the Ink Spots, Cab Calloway, Danny Thomas, Imogene Coca, Leslie Uggams, Rosalind Russell, and Eartha Kitt. Ossie Davis narrated a dramatic sketch called “Jim Crow Must Go”; Lester A. Walton composed the title song.4 But private commitments like these could not repair the damage done at the end of his tenure in Liberia. Despite his work on the commission and on behalf of the NAACP, Walton has no home in the ofﬁcial annals of the civil rights movement. And only death forced him from the fading security of the Dunbar Apartments. This brief snapshot of Walton’s work on the New York City Human Rights Commission and for the NAACP highlights a moment when the United States—or at least the city of New York—recognized the much longer history of discrimination and exclusion that marks the experience of African Americans in the United States. The urgency of Walton’s involvement also points to a longer personal history of seeking a home. It testiﬁes to some unﬁnished business. His last position was not a departure; it reverberated with the stories of a wandering and despised people he had been telling—and reenacting—for decades. In 1922, Walton embarked on a new phase of his journalistic career as a writer—with a byline—for the New York World. He had migrated to New York in 1906 seeking the promised land; now he was making his debut writing about other people’s quests. A ﬁve-part series of articles on the status of African Americans in the South began on July 23 with a piece on the impact of the world war on black life and ended on August 27 with a report on schools for Negroes in the South. The second story in the series, “‘Jim Crow’ Rules Drive High Grade Blacks from Home,” seems to have been the one that most interested readers of the World, because it helped them better comprehend the onrush of migrants into their city. It would be the theme for numerous articles Walton published as a feature writer for the World, a position he was offered shortly after the series concluded successfully. In fact, Walton became something of an expert on the subject of migration, invited by the leaders of the NAACP in 1923 to speak on African 4. See the ﬂyer in LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 10.

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American migration at their meeting in Kansas City.5 The day after the last article in the series appeared, Thomas Jesse Jones sent a letter of appreciation to the editor of the World. “Your plan to have a colored man present the point of view of his race is undoubtedly sound and helpful,” Jones wrote. “The articles reﬂect not only the broad racial attitude of the writer on race questions but also show a knowledge of statistical sources of information.”6 Walton’s articles were, indeed, well researched and contained statistical information he had gleaned from census data, ofﬁcial state sources, and several trips to the South. But his overall interpretation of the underlying causes of migration contains echoes of personal experience. In his initial foray into the subject of migration, Walton emphasized white people’s underestimation of blacks, the productive types who were most apt to leave, and the desire for “better treatment” that drove people from home. Popular understanding of the phenomenon focused almost exclusively on economic motives—the recent war had attracted thousands of African American men and women from all parts of the South to jobs in industrial cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit. Walton complicates this view considerably by telling of professionals—physicians and undertakers—who, he insists, offer a better window into the mind-set of the migrant than does an unskilled worker. He actually opens the piece with a conversation he overheard. A black southerner traveling to Michigan is discouraged from doing so by a white southerner who tells the migrant he’ll be returning as soon as he gets a taste of northern winter. A white salesman tells Walton, with a nudge and a wink, that whites sure know blacks in the South. “With the Negro in recent years leaving the South in astounding numbers, I was wondering if the white man really knew his brother of darker hue as well as he imagined,” was Walton’s journalistic retort. The prediction of a hasty retreat from the North arose principally because white people did not understand why blacks took ﬂight. “Negroes are forsaking the Southland for the following reasons,” Walton explained. “To secure equal protection of life and property under the law; to secure equal justice in the courts; to enjoy the right to vote, and to escape the ignominy of riding in ‘jim crow’ cars.” The fundamental reasons for African Americans uprooting themselves from the land of their birth, as Walton saw it, bear all the marks of a desire to escape.7 5. Lester A. Walton, “White and Negro Conferees Seek Inter-Racial Good,” New York World, September 9, 1923, S-8, col. 1–3. 6. “Phases of the Negro Problem,” New York World, August 28, 1922, 8, col. 7. 7. Lester A. Walton, “‘Jim Crow’ Rules Drive High Grade Blacks from Home,” New York World, July 30, 1922, S-6, col. 1–6. The other articles in the series include “War Training Puts Negro into Better Attitude toward Life,” New York World, July 23, 1922,

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The theme of escape pervades Walton’s early writings at the World. “Negroes in Terror Fleeing the South” exclaims one of his headlines; “Charge Railroads with Preventing Negroes’ Exodus” reads another. The litany of abuses that inspired the “terror” and “exodus” included lynching, convict labor, night riders, and the absence of any redress in the courts, at the ballot box, or in the legislature. Walton summarized the many interviews he conducted with people on the move: “With sparkling eyes and faces wreathed in smiles they tell you with a display of animation what is nearest to their hearts and minds—of a longing to live in a land where lynching is not a favorite pastime and where race discrimination in its various forms is not so pronounced.”8 He constructed a narrative of the labor history of African Americans that accounted for the longing to leave the South: “After several centuries exploiting Negro brawn, ﬁrst as a free commodity during slavery, next as cheap labor in freedom, from which sprang peonage, labor farms, wholesale arrests and imprisonment for trivial offenses and injustices, this cankerous growth on our economic system has come to a head.”9 While back in Missouri in September 1923 for the NAACP meeting, Walton spent some time in his old hometown, where he encountered hundreds of Negroes recently arrived. Signiﬁcantly, these migrants, like Walton’s father, were coming to St. Louis from Arkansas, where “intolerable conditions” had forced them to leave. Among other desires, they expressed—again, like Benjamin Walton—a wish for “better school facilities for the children.”10 And so they joined the exodus. One can’t help but notice that Walton’s discussion of this new wave of black migration contained elements of his memory and experience as well as ﬁrsthand witness and statistical veriﬁcation. In some ways the facts and ﬁgures in his articles betray an effort by Walton to ﬁnd an effective language for this social phenomenon, a language that would speak as powerfully to a white audience as terms like lynching, the Klan, and imprisonment resonated

Second New Section, 3 (I read a microﬁlmed copy of the World, and unfortunately, this section of this particular issue was not copied. The title provided is based on the frontpage listing of features.); “Negro Banks Bring Respect of Whites and Racial Pride,” New York World, August 6, 1922, M-4, col. 1–6; “Negro Called ‘The Backbone of the South,’” New York World, August 20, 1922, S-8, col. 1–3; and “Over Two Million Negro Pupils in South’s Schools,” New York World, August 27, 1922, S-7, col. 1–6. 8. Lester A. Walton, “Negroes in Terror Fleeing the South; Whites Alarmed,” New York World, January 14, 1923, M-4, col. 1–5; “Negro Migrants Say Southerners Force Them Out,” New York World, September 30, 1923, S-6, col. 1; and “Cotton Fields Lie Weed Choked as Negro Stampedes,” New York World, August 12, 1923, M-8, col. 2. 9. Lester A. Walton, “Honor Dead Negro Soldier at C.C.N.Y.; Legion to Attend,” New York World, May 27, 1923, S-10, col. 2. 10. Lester A. Walton, “Negro Migrants Say Southerners Force Them Out,” S-6, col. 1.

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with blacks. For Walton knew that these escapes had been going on for centuries—his mother’s family had ﬂed Tennessee for the “free” state of Illinois years before the Civil War and again sought refuge in the East St. Louis area to avoid being enslaved on the eve of the war. Walton’s father had shaken off the dust of Arkansas as soon as he could make his way to St. Louis. And there, in 1879, while awaiting the birth of his ﬁrst child, witnessed a new ﬂood of refugees from the South. You can almost hear the echoes of these “Exodusters” in Walton’s interviews with the post–World War I migrants. Here’s what the Exodusters told Col. Frank H. Fletcher, who was sent to investigate the underlying reason for the great escapes: George Roan: “The Southerners do everything to prevent my people from coming away; but we are afraid to stay. . . . The law don’t protect us.” Orange Pachet: “They tried to prevent my going to Kansas. One man shook his ﬁst in my face, and said, ‘Damn you, sir, you are my property.’” George Halliday: “We were afraid of our lives, or we would not have come away.” Humphrey Perkins: “If a man talks of going away, they trump up some charge against him, and put him in prison.” Mrs. William Ray: “We left Texas because they treated us so bad. They took out my husband’s brother-in-law and shot him three times in the face. They came after my husband one night and made him give up his pistol. They took my aunts and son-in-law out and beat them.” Richard Coutcher: “I would not go back South unless I was forced to. . . . I knew colored men killed because they were Republicans. The colored people have got so that they are afraid of their lives to live there. They have come away from there because they can’t live there. The white people have sworn they will kill the last one of us if we don’t vote with them, and they were killing us so fast, I thought I would get away while I could.”11

These desperate people traveled up the Mississippi River any way they could, crowding onto steamboats when possible, and hoped to go further west. Rumor had it that from the Gateway City you could get free passage along the Missouri River and go west across the state, and people with little 11. Negro Exodus: Report of Colonel Frank H. Fletcher (n.p., n.d.), Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri, 4, 6, 19–22.

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to lose believed it to be true. It wasn’t so. But since the painful truth did not become clear until the “refugees” (as they came to be known) landed in St. Louis, they depended on the assistance of the black community in the city. Three, perhaps four, of the most prominent African American citizens involved in the relief effort had connections with the Waltons’ baby who was born amidst the social crisis of 1879. Charleton H. Tandy was the ﬁrst prominent black St. Louisan who recognized that the Exodusters needed help, but the city’s Mullanphy Emigrant Relief Board, from which he requested ﬁnancial aid, initially refused assistance before eventually granting a paltry one hundred dollars to the effort. Tandy put out a call to the black community, and volunteers assembled at St. Paul’s A. M. E. Church, where a Committee of Twenty-ﬁve, or the Colored Relief Board, was formed. The Rev. John Turner and the Rev. Moses Dickson—both connected to the Waltons—emerged as key leaders over the next months. Reverend Turner had presided over the wedding of Olive Camper and Benjamin Walton the summer before, and since the ceremony took place at St. Paul’s, it is most likely that the Waltons were members of the church. Given Benjamin’s later active involvement in church life, he may have joined the relief effort in spite of his responsibilities as a new father. His son never indicated an awareness of his father’s participation in aiding the migrants. But, of course, having insisted that his birth year was 1882 instead of the year of the exodus, Walton could not have related the coincidence of the crisis and his birth without giving away his secret. In 1902, Walton published a tribute to the recently deceased Reverend Dickson in Colored American Magazine, in which he revealed Dickson’s decades-long efforts to aid African American men and women escaping the brutality of slavery.12 It is hard to imagine that private family discussions about the commingled joy of birth and anxiety over the crisis of refugees did not take place in the Walton home on Gay Street or Cottage Avenue. Walton’s friend J. Milton Turner also played a signiﬁcant role in the relief effort by creating a counterorganization, the Colored Immigration Aid Society, to challenge the church-centered Colored Relief Board. His plan entailed incorporation of a relief group governed by an advisory board of prominent white citizens, which, he believed, would result in more responsible and efﬁcient collection and distribution of aid. Turner’s orga12. Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction, 225– 26; and Suzanna M. Grenz, “The Exodusters of 1879: St. Louis and Kansas City Responses,” 54–63. For Turner’s connection to the Walton family, see marriage records of St. Louis, Missouri, 1877–1881, mf. 929.3778, frame 320, St. Louis Public Library. Turner is listed in the city directory and identiﬁed as the pastor of St. Paul’s in Gould’s St. Louis Directory for 1878, 1222, 930.

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nization actually generated relatively little money, but it did prompt the Tandy-Turner-Dickson group to seek incorporation, which put it on a permanent footing and allowed the Colored Relief Board to carry a debt of about a thousand dollars, when expenditures reached over nine times that amount. Turner ultimately contributed all of the funds raised by the Colored Immigration Aid Society to the Colored Relief Board and then turned his attention to facilitating the movement of African Americans from the South to the West—especially Kansas and Indian Territory. He spent months seeking land rights for black migrants hoping to start new lives in the West.13 Walton’s writing about the postwar migrants is colored by a kind of reenactment—a compulsive replay of scenes of oppression, dispossession, and agency—in the hope of both grasping and conveying what this frequent uprooting meant. Migration was but the manifestation of a more profound haunting that a relatively privileged Walton felt as keenly as the men and women ﬂeeing in the face of terror and injustice. But they could not name the specter that haunted them. African Americans themselves were ghosts, invisible and despised, wandering across the land they wanted to call home but never ﬁnding peace or a place where they belonged. Walton wrote in 1923: “When I visited the South last December murmurings of discontent were audible on every hand. Negroes loudly complained of low wages and ill-treatment. They were becoming restless, irritable, and demanding the dawn of a better day.”14 He could as easily have been writing about his own trek from St. Louis to New York as about the decision of black southerners to head into the unknown. For in spite of his introduction to the World readership as “one of the leading Negro newspaper men of this country,” Walton had reason to doubt his acceptance in the United States. To speak now what was unspeakable then is a tricky matter, indeed, for on the surface, Walton’s life palpably improved once he reached New York. But remembering Walton demands respect for and understanding of his demons, because they lie at the center of a national experience buried beneath the shibboleth of history. Their story is the untold story Americans have yet to confront, and they promise us entrée into a radical consciousness of the past. In exploring this reenactment, we need not grind our gears reenacting the will to elide the truth.

13. Painter, Exodusters, 226–27; Lawrence O. Christensen, “J. Milton Turner: An Appraisal,” 1–19; and N. Webster Moore, “James Milton Turner, Diplomat, Educator, and Defender of Rights 1840–1915,” 194–201. 14. Walton, “Cotton Fields Lie Weed Choked as Negro Stampedes,” M-8, col. 2.

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Although he never said it, Walton had embarked on his journey away from St. Louis because of “discontent,” “ill-treatment,” restlessness, irritability, and the desire for something better. The move already had cost him a great deal in personal terms—it would cost him even more in the years ahead—even though it had brought him relationships he would cherish to his last breath. The positive aspects of his own migration had laid the groundwork for his position at the World; the disappointments he tried to overcome through vigorous denial. Of all the migration narratives he penned, Walton’s own was sketchy at best. On the occasion of Ernest Hogan’s death in 1909, Walton wrote: “It was a very few years ago when the writer was then a reporter on a St. Louis daily that he met ‘the Unbleached American,’ who was the leading comedian of the Smart Set Company. It was Ernest Hogan who ﬁnally induced the writer to come East to act as his personal representative during the second season of the Rufus Rastus Company.”15 Not a word about the experience at the Star. No mention of his reported employment as a salesman and a stenographer. No indication of what it meant to cut ties with parents, sisters, a brother, and old-time friends and to make his way on the unfamiliar streets of New York among men and women—save Hogan—he did not know. Walton may have gone to New York to serve as Hogan’s “personal representative,” but it was not long before he joined the staff of the New York Age. Had he approached the editor, Fred R. Moore, with a proposal to report on the colored acts then gaining prominence? Had Moore sought him out after reading his article in Colored American Magazine on Negro performers? Neither man ever said. But after several articles on African American shows that appeared in 1907 in the columns devoted to other newsworthy events and after Moore ofﬁcially was named as owner and editor of the Age, Walton became editor in February 1908 of a page devoted to music and the stage. He worked diligently to make it a vital section in Moore’s newspaper. Moore soon became more than an employer to Walton. He involved him in the National Negro Business League, introduced him to his contacts at Tuskegee (although Walton already might have met Booker T. Washington in St. Louis, for in 1904, he published an article on the Tuskegeean’s visit to the city), and included him in numerous civic events. In 1912, Moore became Walton’s father-in-law, when on June 29, his daughter Gladys married his protégé.16 Moore welcomed two Walton

15. Lester A. Walton, “Death of Ernest Hogan,” New York Age, May 27, 1909, 6, col. 2. 16. For Walton’s article on Booker T. Washington see “Washington on Truth about Negroes,” St. Louis Star, June 30, 1904, 1, col. 1–3. On the marriage of Walton and Moore see Young, “Lester A. Walton,” 40–41; “Lester A. Walton,” Who’s Who in Colored Amer-

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granddaughters, Marjorie, in 1913, and Gladys (“Sister”), in 1914. On the occasion of Moore’s death in 1943, Walton composed “An Appreciation of Frederick Randolph Moore,” in which he remembered his father-in-law as a tireless and fearless public leader and as a man who regarded himself as “head of a clan which not only included his direct descendants but also his ‘in-laws.’”17 Thus, within a decade of leaving St. Louis, Walton had found love—he and Gladys were married for more than ﬁfty years—had started a family, and had discovered in Moore a mentor and role model to whom he owed many of his subsequent professional opportunities and for whom he felt both admiration and affection. Walton had also found in New York a large ﬁeld for his talents and quickly made friends with whom he collaborated on all sorts of ventures. He was at the center of two prominent organizations for African American performers, The Frogs and the Colored Vaudevillian Benevolent Association, and was made an honorary member of James Reese Europe’s Clef Club when it formed in 1910.18 In 1911, Walton became an ofﬁcer in the Johnson Amusement Company along with Thomas Johnson, Harry Kraton, and Moore with the goal of building a theater “in the heart of the colored residential district” at 138th Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues. The project was meant to create employment opportunities for African American performers as well as to stimulate investment in a black-owned business in Harlem.19 Walton co-owned and managed the Lafayette Theater from 1914 to 1916 and again from 1919 to 1921. In between these stints, Walton and Alex Rogers launched the Walton Publishing Company in 1918 to showcase African American compositions. What makes these activities almost dizzying is that he undertook them all in addition to his work at the Age.20 ica, 1938–1940, 538; Harry S. Creamer, “The Frogs’ Frolic,” New York Age, July 4, 1912, 6, col. 1. Creamer edited Music and the Stage while Walton was on his honeymoon. He reported that the Frogs teased Walton right before his wedding by chanting “Battlecry of Freedom” to “a young man, small in stature but large in intellect and extraordinary in sentiment” and “soon to be tied till death us do part—the small man is Lester A. Walton—realizing that he is taking his last frolic as a single man . . . just prior to making his last rounds—and believe me, kid—he frolicked some after that.” 17. The three-page, undated typescript of “An Appreciation of Frederick Randolph Moore” by Lester A. Walton is in LAWPA, box 8, ﬁle 17. 18. “Musicians Organize Clef Club,” New York Age, April 28, 1910, 6, col. 3. 19. “New Theatre for Harlem,” New York Age, November 30, 1911, 6, col. 1–2; “Walker-Hogan-Cole Theatre,” New York Age, March 7, 1912, 6, col. 1–2; and “The Commercial Instinct,” New York Age, April 4, 1912, 6, col. 1–2. 20. Young, “Lester A. Walton,” 57–62; “Lafayette Opens under Colored Management to Good House,” New York Age, July 5, 1919, 6, col. 1–2; “Colored Men Organize Theatrical Circuit,” New York Age, July 12, 1919, 1, col. 6; “Quality Amusement Corporation

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Yet for all of this frenzied activity, Walton continued to search for something. Some of his disquietude may be attributed to the disappointing outcomes of his projects. The Hogan-Walker-Cole Theater never materialized—African Americans and whites alike were reluctant to invest in a black-owned enterprise. The Walton Publishing Company struggled primarily because African American composers preferred to place their work with established white publishing houses. Walton’s two stabs at theater management ended in disappointment when Harlemites did not turn out in sufﬁcient numbers to support the shows Walton put on. But these were merely minor setbacks; for every door that closed, another seemed to open. But the question Walton may have posed to himself was: Where do these doors lead? After launching the initiative to capitalize Negro in 1913, it seems as though Walton was searching for gravitas—something recognizably weighty and signiﬁcant that would mark the beginning of a new day. With the United States’ impending involvement in the Great War came public discussions of “democracy” and “freedom” that drew him, he hoped, to his destiny. Amidst the escalating drumbeat for war and the heightened language of patriotism and democracy, preparations for the debut of an all-black cast in Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theater stirred Walton’s optimistic conﬁdence in the serious role drama could play in the realization of American ideals. He touted the production as a new beginning— the valorization of “art for art’s sake” and the ﬁrst real chance for African American performers to represent the variety of black experience and types as a source of genuine American material for the Stage. As Walton well knew, the performance at the Garden Theater on April 5, 1917, was not the ﬁrst time African Americans had appeared on Broadway nor was it the ﬁrst time black entertainers had explored “serious” themes on the stage. But this production was different from the earlier colored shows in that white critics regarded it as legitimate art instead of hilarious diversion. James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois noticed the difference, too, and recorded the debut of the all-black cast as a key moment in the historical development of black participation in America culture.21 But it was not long before preparations for U.S. entry into the war across the Atlantic

Plans to Put Out Musical Productions,” New York Age, September 13, 1919, 6, col. 6–7. On the Walton Publishing Company see “Big Musical Alliance Formed in New York,” New York Age, September 14, 1918, 1, col. 2; and “Music Publishing Houses,” New York Age, October 26, 1918, 6, col. 1–2. 21. Johnson, Black Manhattan; Du Bois, The Gift of the Black Folk; and Curtis, The First Black Actors on the Great White Way.

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eclipsed the discussion of American art. And soon the contingency of African Americans’ claim to American citizenship would be made clear on the streets of East St. Louis. The plays did stimulate a great deal of commentary, and for a time they were “the talk of the town.” But as interest waned, Walton, like many other New Yorkers, turned his attention elsewhere. In June, he and Moore joined the citizens’ committee charged with making arrangements for a big Fourth of July celebration in Harlem. The Fifteenth Regiment agreed to take part, and Walton enlisted speakers, dancers, and other performers to showcase Negro patriotism in a time of war.22 Before the celebration of American Independence came news of a race riot in East St. Louis that shocked Harlem and the nation. For Walton, the riot undoubtedly stirred fears for family members still living and working in the area as well as outrage at the reports of wanton violence. Hundreds of African Americans were affected by the attack of striking white workers on the neighborhoods of black workers—hundreds died, and hundreds more were wounded or left homeless when rampaging white workers torched the homes of blacks. Violence, dispossession, and blame for the riot assigned to African Americans—the magnitude of the disaster deﬁed comprehension.23 Yet, it was in commenting on a far lesser outrage that Walton spoke the panic usually submerged beneath his frantic efforts to succeed. In late July, when (white) suffragettes who were willingly arrested in the name of “real democracy” objected strenuously to being detained in cells with black women, Walton exploded bitterly: “Long ago colored Americans have learned to discount high-sounding phrases on ‘democracy’ having come to the conclusion that the Negro is not included in these rhetorical outbursts disseminated for public consumption.”24 There—he said it: “the Negro is not included.” This moment of clarity induced by the latest trauma of American race relations quickly would be repressed. The New York Age, which was a weekly, did not cover the riot as breaking news. Its ﬁrst major report appeared on the front page of the July 12, 1917, issue. It consisted of an eyewitness account written by Carlos F. Hurd of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with a preface probably written by the man to whom he had sent the piece, Lester A. Walton. The opening paragraph, penned as a professional third-person narrative, contains hints of the personal impact

22. “Committee Named for Fourth Celebration,” New York Age, June 14, 1917, 1, col. 6. 23. William Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919; Elliott Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917. For a powerful literary treatment of the East St. Louis Riot, see Toni Morrison, Jazz, 53–87. 24. “‘A Real Democracy,’” New York Age, July 26, 1917, 6, col. 1–2.

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the riot had on Walton. It acknowledges conﬂicting accounts of the cause of the riot but turns quickly to the effects of the violence—“innocent victims . . . found in charred masses of debris” and “colored women and children . . . going about homeless and helpless by the score.” The riot was a “shocking outburst of savagery,” a “massacre,” and an “atrocity” on a par with the German army’s acts of terror in Brussels and Rheims. Those who blamed African American workers for the conﬂict touched a nerve with Walton: “The employment of Negroes in large numbers is not anything new in East St. Louis. For years they have worked in the stock yards. The big plants of this town and Venice furnish the male inhabitants of Lovejoy, formerly known as Brooklyn, a Negro town a few miles away, with employment at a good remuneration.” Among the “male inhabitants of Lovejoy, formerly known as Brooklyn” were relatives of Walton’s mother—Browns, Campers, Streets, and their descendants, all of whom had been living in the area since the 1860s or 1870s, when terror in Shawneetown had prompted them to leave in haste. If any of them were victims of white workingmen’s rage, Walton could not bring himself to say. He was as silent on this point as the marchers who took to the streets of New York two weeks later.25 The silent parade in New York City organized by the NAACP to protest the attack on East St. Louis blacks was, by all accounts, a moving and sobering display of anguish and disbelief. Walton’s report estimated that nearly 10,000 men, women, and children took part in the demonstration against the “murders” in the Midwest, as well as against “mob law, segregation, ‘Jim Crowism,’ and many other indignities to which their race is unnecessarily subjected in the United States.” The silence and orderliness of the march made it impossible for authorities in the city to trump up charges of instigating social unrest. But the silence as well as the placards carried aloft by wave after wave of African American marchers from Fifty-seventh to Twenty-third Street began the process of submerging the truth under a barrage of slogans insisting on the reality of African American citizenship. They asserted the presence of African American patriots in wartime: “The First Blood for American Independence Was Shed by a Negro— Crispus Attucks” “3,000 Negroes Fought for Independence under George Washington” “12,000 of Us Fought with Jackson at New Orleans” 25. “COUNTRY APPLAUDS ROOSEVELT; RIOT PICTURED BY EYE-WITNESS,” New York Age, July 12, 1917, 1, col. 6; “White Writer on Recent Massacre,” New York Age, July 19, 1917, 1, col. 3.

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“200,000 Black Men Fought for Your Liberty in the Civil War”

They exposed the lies embedded in popular discourse on race: “We are Maligned as Lazy and Murdered When We Work” “We are Excluded from the Unions and Condemned for Not Joining Them” “The World Owes No Man a Living, but Every Man an Opportunity to Earn a Living”

And they challenged white America to honor their Christian convictions and republican slogans: “Thou Shalt Not Kill” “Interpret for Us in Living, Loving Acts the Religion of Jesus Christ” “Put the Spirit of Christ in the Making and Execution of the Laws” “Taxation without Representation” “Make America Safe for Democracy” “America Has Lynched without Trial 2,867 Negroes in 31 Years and Not a Single Murderer Has Suffered”26

Even this display fell on blind eyes. African Americans might just as well have been ghosts. Their pleas for recognition of their status as citizens were heard no better after East St. Louis than they had been before. Protestations of loyalty had begun just days after the U.S. declaration of war. “A Colored American” wrote the editor of the New York World that blacks had “never failed to answer the call in time of war.” Dr. Frissell of the Hampton Institute was quoted in the same section insisting, “The Negro has always been loyal.”27 W. H. Holtzclaw, Principal of the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute, sent a letter to the New York Evening Post in which he, too, argued, “The negro has proved his patriotism from the 26. Lester A. Walton, “Nearly Ten Thousand Take Part in Big Silent Protest Parade Down 5th Avenue,” New York Age, August 2, 1917, 1, col. 1–3. 27. “Negro Patriotism,” New York World, April 8, 1917, Editorial Section, 2, col. 2–3.

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Boston Massacre to Corrizal. He has suffered much at the hands of his countrymen, but still this is his country.”28 Walton agreed with all of these writers, and in the months following the silent parade, he threw himself into the war effort. He sent Emmett Scott a song he had composed, “All for One, One for All,” which he hoped would be used by Scott, in his capacity as special assistant to the secretary of war, to promote both racial unity and patriotism. In December 1917, Walton accepted an appointment by Marc Klaw to serve as a member of the Commission on Training Camp Activities. His job was to “organize minstrel and dramatic companies among the colored draftees stationed at the various cantonments throughout the country.”29 For the next six months, Walton made regular trips to Camp Upton on Long Island, seeking talented black soldiers for the shows he would produce. In the pages of the Age, he promoted “Smileage” booklets, which gave soldiers admission to “Liberty Theaters” set up in each camp. And he maintained contact with the headquarters of the commission, on whose ofﬁcial stationery his name appeared by early spring.30 Invisibility had set in once more by the summer of 1918. The Washington ofﬁce of the commission no longer acknowledged Walton as a member. The staff stonewalled when he requested the half-fare rate on the Long Island Railroad for his trips to Camp Upton, and Malcolm McBride, who was in charge of the Liberty Theaters, refused to respond to Walton’s request for assistance in staging entertainment for the black troops. By September, Walton angrily took the no-longer-subtle hints. He wrote McBride “to ascertain my status with the Commission, as I am unable to exactly state to my friends and the public whether I am in or out.” McBride replied that he would welcome Walton’s “suggestions from time to time,” but there was no opening for Walton on the commission. Walton then turned to Emmett Scott to intercede on his behalf, and the special assistant promised Walton to “ﬁnd a place in which your valued talents may be utilized.” In his ﬁnal missive to McBride, Walton expressed regret at having gotten involved in “this unpleasant incident.” He sarcastically apologized for “‘being too insistent,’” but noted, in cadences reminiscent of black oratorical traditions: 28. “Negroes Loyal,” New York Evening Post, April 8, 1917, 8, col. 6. 29. Walton sent the song through an acquaintance, Albion Holsey. See Albion L. Holsey to Emmett J. Scott, September 7, 1918, National Archives, Record Group 107, E96, Emmett Scott Papers (hereinafter RG 107, E96, ESPA), box 1, ﬁle H. For the announcement of his appointment to the commission, see “Negro Member of Military Entertainment Service,” New York Age, December 8, 1917, 1, col. 1–2. 30. For a longer discussion of Walton’s involvement in the commission, see Curtis, The First Black Actors on the Great White Way, chapter 6. For evidence of Walton’s work, see “‘Smileage,’” New York Age, December 22, 1917, 6, col. 1–2; and “Soldier Boys Make Hit as Musicians at Studio Recital,” New York Age, April 13, 1918, 1, col. 1.

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It has been due, to a large measure, to our insistence that colored Americans throughout the country buy Liberty Bonds that millions of dollars of such bonds have been purchased; it has been due to our insistence that many thousands of dollars of War Savings Stamps have been bought by the colored citizens of New York during the present drive being conducted under the auspices of the Age; it has been due to our insistence that colored Americans have purchased books for their boys who are helping maintain the Liberty Theatre.

He went on As for future suggestions, Mr. Emmett J. Scott is fully qualiﬁed to make them. What the Commission needs is men to carry out suggestions so far as colored men are concerned. This only can be done by giving the Negro proper representation; and while doing the right thing might clash with the ideas of some relative to just how big a position a colored American is entitled to, I am sure it will be consistent with the ideas of right and in tune with the song of “Democracy” now sweeping this country.31

Walton may have had his say, but he apparently was no more visible to McBride. And once again, his own “migration” from Harlem to Long Island in search of convincing evidence of his existence as an American citizen ended in frustration. The theme of invisibility resurfaced in Walton’s writings later in 1918, when he reviewed America’s Answer, a movie produced under the auspices of the Committee on Public Information. In the pages of the New York Age, Walton confessed that he had taken “an active part in the handclapping; but when it was over deep down in my heart there was an aching void—because of all the hundreds of soldiers I had seen not one was a colored American.” Walton believed African Americans had been “completely blotted out” because of a “tacit understanding” that black troops should be kept “in the background as much as possible.” Although the focus of the ﬁlm was on soldiers awarded medals for bravery in combat, it failed to include Henry Johnson of the all-black Fifteenth Regiment, who was the ﬁrst American to earn the Croix de Guerre from France. It

31. Walton to Malcolm McBride, September 12, 1918; and McBride to Walton, September 12, 1918, in NARA, RG 165, E393, #38771; Walton to McBride, September 21, 1918, NARA, RG 165, E393, #39561; Emmett Scott to Walton, September 19, 1918, LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 6/2. For evidence of Walton’s status on the commission, see Hollis Cooley to Raymond Fosdick, March 27, 1918, NARA, RG165, E393, #28893, where Walton is listed on the ofﬁcial letterhead as a committee head.

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failed as well to show any of the black soldiers decorated for valor. The Creel Committee did plan to make ﬁlms about African American troops in France, but they were to be distributed only to movie houses in black communities, a decision that Walton regarded as a form of Jim Crow. He wanted ﬁlmic evidence of black courage in war to be presented to white audiences. He wanted his people to be visible.32 In the following months, Scott kept his promise to ﬁnd Walton valuable work to do, and the new opportunity required more travel. This time Walton was one of two African American journalists who accompanied Robert Russa Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor at Tuskegee, to Europe to visit African American soldiers still stationed there after the war. Walton and Du Bois were also sent to cover the Versailles Peace Conference. Walton, Du Bois, Moton, and about one hundred white correspondents set sail on the Orizaba on December 1, 1918.33 Walton cabled reports back to New York for publication in the Age. He played up the signiﬁcance and visibility of Moton’s visit by announcing that President Wilson had requested a conference with the Tuskegeean to discuss the question of what should be done with Germany’s colonial possessions in Africa. But by the end of the peace conference, it had become clear that Wilson’s interest in Moton’s opinion was something of a sham. In one of his ﬁnal cables Walton reported that the European victors were determined to claim Germany’s colonial holdings in Africa, news that came, according to Walton, “with a suddenness both bewildering and alarming.” Walton’s analysis of worldwide race relations bore a striking resemblance to his view of black-white relations in the United States. Africa for the Africans is the demand of the natives and the darker races throughout the world. Africans helped to save civilization, as the grateful French will attest. The same caliber of black man whose timely arrival changed the tide at the Battle of the Marne is now being regarded by many diplomats as utterly incapable of managing his own affairs. The principle of self-determination of which we hear so much nowadays evidently does not apply to the African.34

32. Lester A. Walton, “Our Colored Heroes in the Movies,” New York Age, November 30, 1918, 6, col. 1–2. 33. “Tuskegee’s Principal to Undertake Work for Troops (sic) Morale,” New York Age, December 7, 1918, 1, col. 4; p. 7, col. 7; Walton to Charles Merz, editor of the New York Times, November 27, 1950, LAWPA, box 18, ﬁle 8, recounts his role and itinerary in Europe. 34. Lester A. Walton, “Darker Races Oppose ‘Gobbling Up’ of African Colonies,” New York Age, February 8, 1919, 1, col. 1–2; p. 5, col. 6.

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Like in the United States, the white world community doubted the capacity of Africans for leadership and refused to apply cherished principles to nonwhite societies. With Du Bois as one of his traveling companions, Walton would have had an opportunity to contemplate and begin to formulate a more thoroughly transnational view of interracial conﬂict and to link the fate of Africans with that of African Americans. In the coming decades Walton acted on this realization. Yet, Walton narrated this intellectual migration no more completely than the other physical and professional moves he had made since leaving St. Louis. Indeed, we are left to draw conclusions that may or may not be accurate based on the circumstances of his trip. Among the other passengers on board the Orizaba, Herbert Bayard Swope and Ralph Pulitzer represented the World, and Thomas Jesse Jones, a noted activist on behalf of black education, was part of the Moton party. Was it during this trip that a deeper acquaintance with Swope led to the invitation to Walton to write the ﬁve-part series on African Americans in the South? Jones remembered clearly that it was on this trip that he ﬁrst met and was impressed by Walton, but at this juncture did they discuss the situation in Liberia, which would later become the focus of their work together? Understandably, Walton did not report these private connections in his journalism (maybe there was nothing to report), and no letters from this period survive to explicate how this journey affected Walton’s thinking. Moreover, whatever impact on Walton’s life these contacts might have had, they were not immediate. Swope had been in touch with Walton even before the trip to Europe, his paper leading the way among white dailies in 1915 to capitalize Negro, following up in 1917 on Walton’s “tip” to pay closer attention to lynching, and agreeing in 1918 to discontinue the use of the term darkies. In later correspondence Swope requested Walton’s materials on the Ku Klux Klan, and it seems probable that Walton had done some of the investigative research that led to the World’s Pulitzer Prize for the exposé of the Klan (although publicly, Swope attributed the bulk of the information to research conducted by Walter White).35 35. On the other passengers, see Lester A. Walton, “Tuskegee’s Principal Tells of Industrial Renaissance South,” New York Age, December 28, 1918, 1, col. 6–7. On Swope’s contact with Walton, change in policies, and the exposé of the KKK, see Kahn, The World of Swope, 240–41, 244; Lewis, Man of the World, 97; Swope to Walton, March 19, 1915, and C. M. Lincoln (New York World) to Walton, May 20, 1918, both in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 5; “‘World’ Discontinues Use of ‘Darkies,’” New York Age, June 29, 1918, 1, col. 5; Swope to Walton, January 9, 1917, and W. P. Beazell, executive editor of the New York World, to Walton, August 31, 1921, both in LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 3. For Jones’s recollection of his ﬁrst meeting with Walton, see Thomas Jesse Jones to George Foster Peabody, November 7, 1930, LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 4.

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From 1922 until 1931, when the World folded, Walton wrote a weekly feature on African American life and achievement for the newspaper. He traveled to the South to see for himself the conditions that prevailed for Negroes—getting bounced from his seat on a Pullman car was part of the price he paid for his eyewitness account. He also related stories from the streets of Harlem—about strivers, ordinary folk, institutions, and cultural trends. More and more African Americans began reading the World, where they ﬁnally could read fuller accounts of the varied activities of the race. And many readers wrote Walton to express their appreciation for his work.36 Thanks to his father-in-law’s connections, Walton met wealthy and powerful men and women. When the Moores celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 1929, Walton took part in organizing a gala event; the guest list included Mayor Jimmy Walker, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Col. William Hayward (commanding ofﬁcer of the Fifteenth Regiment), and Noble Sissle (star of Shufﬂe Along) and Luckyeth Roberts, who provided entertainment.37 The Moores’ daughter Marion was a bridesmaid at the spectacular wedding of Madam C. J. Walker’s granddaughter, which Walton worked into his story for the World.38 Because of Walton’s ongoing interest in black performance, he met rising stars like Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson, whose stories he also worked into articles.39 In short, Walton immersed himself in the life of the community and waged a weekly battle in the pages of the World against African American invisibility. When I remember the Walton of these years, I realize that he has gotten lost in the swirl of Harlem Renaissance achievements, the rise of the New Negro, the ballyhoo of the Jazz Age, the enormous attraction of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, black unionism, and the emergence of pan-African/transnational political organizations and perspectives, all of which are more readily accessible as symbols

36. See, for example, W. J. Jefferson to Walton, December 30, 1926; and Jerome D. Harris to Walton, April 15, 1926, both in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 2; and A. B. Jackson to Walton, April 21, 1927, LAWPA, box 7, ﬁle 2. 37. See a program for the celebration in LAWPA, box 16, ﬁle 3. 38. “Thousands Attend Wedding of Negro Heiress in Harlem,” New York World, November 25, 1923, 3, col. 6. 39. “Gilpin Home Guest at Club Reception,” New York Age, March 26, 1921, 6, col. 3, reports on a gathering of the “Club of Sixteen,” at which Charles Gilpin was the guest of honor, Paul Robeson sang, and the Moores and Waltons were guests. Lester A. Walton, “Negro Vocalist Captures Musical Boston by His Artistry,” New York World, November 25, 1923, S-10, col. 2–3, discusses Roland Hayes’s rising career. Lester A. Walton, “Negro Culture and Art Bearing Fruit in Harlem,” New York World, March 15, 1923, section 2, 5, col. 1–2, offers a more general discussion of Harlem as a “mecca for ambitious poets, writers, singers, actors, sculptors, and dancers.”

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of African American politics and culture in the 1920s. On deeper reﬂection, I see Walton as a man who had grown up with the institutions that purveyed mass culture in the twentieth century and who understood how they worked from an insider’s perspective. Yet, in most discussions of mass culture in the American Century, African Americans are seen more as subjects (performers, athletes, victims of lynching, perpetrators of crime) than as formulators of news. Studies of mass culture show the subtle and overt ways that advertising, news, and popular diversions reinforced racial hierarchies and how an African American performance style and culture infused the dominant culture with energy and novelty. But starting in the 1920s, Walton used his position at the World to place more boldly stories of his people before a largely white reading public—stories that worked against the ingrained perception of African Americans as lazy, violent, ignorant, abject, oversexed, and dishonest. We are here in the United States, Walton proclaimed, building businesses, amassing fortunes, ﬁnancing social institutions, rebounding from adversity, and ﬁnding dignity in ordinary as well as extraordinary jobs. Was it another instance of trauma induced by invisibility that prompted Walton to create the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers (CCNP) in 1951? The magic of television made it possible for people all across the country to see the United States in all its complexity and diversity, but as Walton read the situation, television would only continue effacing people of color and purvey the fantasy of an all-white citizenry. As chairman of the CCNP, Walton, together with his two vice chairmen, Dick Campbell and Fred O’Neal, met with top executives at CBS, NBC, and later ABC, urging them to cast African Americans in roles based on their talent. After all, they argued, television programs claimed to portray life in the U.S., and in that life, blacks worked as doctors and lawyers, policemen and ﬁremen, factory workers and journalists. They were Americans and should be part of the television scene. The council fought the cancellation of the Amos ‘n’ Andy television program, bucking a segment of the black community that found the show insulting to the race. In the course of lobbying for the program, Walton succeeded in urging the show’s writers to drop objectionable characters and to modify others. The CCNP also attempted to pressure Robert Josephs, who was staging My Darlin’ Aida in 1952, to use an African American singer in the title role. In spite of their unstinting efforts, the show went on without a black star.40 But win or lose, the council made the dominant ﬁgures in the entertainment industry conscious that their decisions were being watched. 40. See relevant correspondence in LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 19.

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When television executives said they didn’t know many African American actors, Walton and the CCNP created a “blue book,” which included photographs, credits, and personal sketches.41 When they claimed that no one submitted proposals for programming that could use black performers, Walton supplied them. His prospectus for “One America” offered an elaborate justiﬁcation for a program featuring blacks: For the ﬁrst time in history—by the magic of Television—it is now possible for millions of white Americans to have Negroes literally in their living rooms—to meet them face to face and see for themselves that Negroes are not so different, and not so unattractive as the general prejudice against Negroes would have people suppose. Familiarity does not breed contempt—more likely, it breeds understanding and friendship.42

At the end of the prospectus, Walton listed entertainers and celebrities he imagined being asked to appear—Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, Louis Armstrong, the Ink Spots, Cab Calloway, and Duke Ellington among them. Among the weekly guests of honor, one ﬁnds political ﬁgures, athletes, professionals, and, at the end of the list, “the author of ‘Invisible Man’ (prize-winning novel).” I wonder if Walton had read Ralph Ellison’s novel and why he stumbled in naming the author. Walton devoted about three years to the CCNP, working to make Negroes visible, barking at television executives when the networks resisted change, and writing letters and press releases and breakthroughs, making telephone calls, and arranging face-to-face meetings. In the only full-length study of the CCNP and the Negro Actors Guild of America from which it emerged, Walton is dismissed as a mere ﬁgurehead, largely because of Dick Campbell’s memory of their work together. Campbell clearly was a driving force in the organization, but I suspect that he underestimated Walton’s contributions because they were not publicly apparent. By contrast, Sydney Eiges of NBC sent Walton a telegram on the occasion of his retirement, insisting that he’d never be forgotten. Eiges knew what some of Walton’s coworkers did not—Walton kept steady pressure on the networks to do the right thing, and even when they thought they were cooperating with the CCNP, Walton showed them how much further they still could go. In order to make African Americans visible as American people, Walton himself withdrew into the anonymity that is the destiny of the culture 41. Undated minutes of CCNP meeting, LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 19; and temporary list, LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 18. 42. “THE ‘ONE AMERICA’ PROGRAM,” LAWPA, box 6, ﬁle 18.

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worker. He was the invisible scribe who planted stories about the National Negro Business League, the Atlanta-based Interracial Commission, the Tuskegee Institute, the Phelps-Stokes Fund’s efforts on behalf of the race, and Africa in the columns of a large-circulation daily. He was the ghost writer of campaign literature for the Democratic National Committee that was meant to lure enough black voters away from the party of Lincoln to make of the African American electorate a valuable prize to be won by candidates responsive to their interests. If the mass media could be manipulated so as to efface the existence of African Americans, could it not be manipulated to make African American citizenship a reality in the national consciousness? As chair of the CCNP, Walton believed that it could. But he was no more visible in that work than he was as a member of the New York City Commission on Human Rights. I feel compelled to add a postscript to this instance of reenactment in Walton’s life, for although he never tabulated the cost of leaving St. Louis, his archives silently bear witness to strained family ties and uncertainty that accompanied his quest. A portrait of his brother Benjamin, sent to the wrong address in 1910, is inscribed simply: “Do you know that it has been three years since I saw you.” Benjamin died sometime between 1926, the date of the will that remains among Walton’s papers, and 1931, when their father passed away. There is no other evidence of contact between the two brothers. Letters from his sisters in 1931 express concern over his desperate search for employment. One from Nan included some “smoke money,” a reminder that he would soon reach the limit of his ability to borrow money, and the simple opening, “I’m just a little anxious about you.” Another from Julia, experiencing a difﬁcult pregnancy that soon would end her life, reads: “We are all anxious as to what you are going to do but naturally we are, Les. But whatever you decide here’s hoping you the very best of luck.” And shortly after her death an anguished letter from “Mama”: “Lester I wanted so much for you to come. I would have insisted had you not feared you might lose out if you had been called.” Another letter, written about the same time: “Remember this you are the bread winner and would be most miserable should you have to depend on Gladys or the girls for help as you have always been able to hold your own. p.s. Don’t let the glare of New York sway you.”43 There’s a half-ﬁnished layout for a 43. The portrait of Benjamin Walton Jr. is in LAWPC, box 1, folder Lester Walton Portraits, #11,289. For the letters from Walton’s sisters and mother see Nan to Les, March 3, 1931, LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 11; “Jul” to Les, July 8, 1931, LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 1/9; Mama to Lester, July 4, 1931, and July 13, 1932, in LAWPA, box 1, ﬁle 1/8.

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Benjamin Walton Jr. Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

magazine, planned but never launched, that testiﬁes to Walton’s scramble for a way to make a living. In 1932, he was a ﬁfty-three-year-old husband, father of two beautiful teenage daughters, and unemployed at the nadir of the economic depression. I wonder if he imagined that his greatest work still lay ahead of him. Walton’s untold migration narrative provides insight into the precariousness of success for African Americans. Even a person like Walton, willing to jump at the main chance, to build professional networks, to live within his means, and to enjoy the unique position of being on the fulltime staff of an inﬂuential white daily, found success to be elusive; even Walton’s ﬁnancial reserves in times of ﬁnancial crisis were shallow. Moreover, this was not the ﬁrst time, nor would it be the last, that he had to start all over again. In another sense, Walton’s is the quintessential story of the

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Postcard from Benjamin Walton to Lester A. Walton: “Do you know that it has been three years since I saw you, your brother, Ben.” Photo courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

American Century—one of taking advantage of new modes of transportation, innovative means of communication, and seeking one’s fortunes far from home.44 One lesson that can be derived from Walton’s experience is both profound and indifferent to race. Walton reminds us that leaving home has its costs, but it also presents the opportunity to build community anew on the foundations of democracy instead of hidebound tradition. But how can we build community anew when we’re so prone to forget our own past? How can we collectively conquer the specters of the past if we refuse to name them, confront them, and try to understand the treacheries to which they bear silent witness? These memories, no longer green, must be revived, no matter how painful, embarrassing, or inconvenient they might be. What I have offered here is, as I promised, not a biography but a willful act of remembering. After scouring numerous archives I can’t supply basic information that a biography requires—I still don’t know for sure when 44. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People, A Memoir; and C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, eds., This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class.

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Walton was born, what his mixed-race ancestry preﬁgured, or why he kept Scott Joplin at arm’s length. But my hope is that you know something about Lester Aglar Walton and why he is worth remembering. For his secrets and disquietude—apparent sometimes as little more than textual disruptions—lead us to the side roads of the past bypassed by history but well trod in private memory, where oppression and dispossession, racism and violence belie national narratives of progress and democracy. Reassuring biographies that chart birth, greatness, death, and legacy do not repair the damage done and the injustice reproduced across the generations. Remembering Walton means remembering how and why our ancestors betrayed the highest ideals on which progress and democracy rest; it means pondering our own unwitting complicity in that betrayal. It means reviving a memory no longer green.

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Archives Chicago Historical Society Claude A. Barnett Papers Arthur W. Mitchell Papers Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and Archives, Hyde Park, New York Gallatin County Courthouse, Shawneetown, Illinois Deed Registries Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division NAACP Papers Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri Municipal Records, New York City Hall National Archives, Washington, D. C. Record Group 165, World War I Emmett J. Scott Papers Lester A. Walton, U.S. Minister to Liberia, 1935–1946 St. Louis Public Library Birth Records, City of St. Louis Marriage Records, City of St. Louis St. Louis Public Schools Archives, St. Louis, Missouri St. Peter’s Cemetery Records, St. Louis, Missouri Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Lester A. Walton Papers Lester A. Walton Photograph Collection

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Adams, Henry, 124 African American citizenship, 22–23, 88, 201 African American migration, 250–52 Aiken, Paul C., 169 Alling, Paul, 194 Alstork, J. W., 115 American Century, 4, 7, 10, 271 American Colonization Society, 199, 201, 203, 206 American Negro Exposition, 103 Amos ‘n’ Andy, 26 n., 267 Anderson, Marian, 51 Anderson, Samuel, 57 Anglo-Boer War, 234, 237, 241, 242–44 Archives, 33–39, 41, 46, 137–38, 153, 178– 79, 183–84, 269–70 Archivist, 35, 153 Armstrong, Louis, 268 Associated Negro Press, 39, 196, 217, 220 Associated Press, 84, 86, 108, 226 Attucks, Crispus, 45, 260

Belle, Charlie, 166 Berle, Adolf, 145, 146, 191, 192–93, 197 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 195, 197 Biography, 5–7, 52, 272 Biondi, Martha, 249 Black Cabinet, 146, 192, 196, 197 Bloom, Sol, 138 Boas, Franz Uri, 85 Boer War Camp, 233–34, 237, 244; and battle reenactments, 234–35 Booze, Mary, 164 Briggs, Cyril, 14 Briggs, Ellis O., 197, 217 Brittons, The, 18–19 Brooklyn, Illinois, 60–61, 260 Broun, Heywood, 29 Brown, Earl, 51 Brown, Julia A., 57–58 Brown, Sterling, 27 Bruce, Edward E., 240 Bruce, Roscoe Conkling, 183, 223 Burch, Ben, 115

Baden-Powell, R. S. S., 243 Badger, Reid, 27, Bailey, Pearl, 268 Barclay, Arthur, 200 Barclay, Edwin, 136, 137–38, 141, 142, 183–84, 186, 188, 195, 218, 220, 221 Barnett, Claude A., 39, 47, 63, 66, 146–47, 159, 167, 177–78, 183, 186, 189, 195, 202, 214, 217, 220 Basutoland, 242

Calloway, Cab, 250, 268 Campbell, Dick, 267, 268 Camper, Jefferson, 58 Cantor, Eddie, 29 Cartwright, Marguerite, 158 Caruth, Cathy, 231 Case, Charlie, 109, Cayton, Horace, 82 Chamberlain, Joseph, 244 Chandler, Owen, 52

285

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286 Chauvin, Louis, 121, 129, 160 Chicago Defender, 72 Christy, Cuthbert, 200, 219 Churchill, Winston, 119; and The Crisis, 119–22 Civil Rights Movement, 5, 147, 154, 249, 250 Clef Club, 257 Clinton, G. W., 115 Coca, Imogene, 250 Cole, Bob, 12, 22, 28–30 Cole and Johnson, 16, 20; and The Red Moon, 20; and Shoo Fly Regiment, 16– 17, 20 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, 12 Colored Immigration Aid Society (St. Louis), 254–55 Colored Relief Board (St. Louis), 254–55 Colored Vaudevillian Benevolent Association, 12, 15–16, 19, 257 Commission on Human Rights (New York City), 26, 76, 82, 250, 269 Commission on Intergroup Relations (New York City), 26, 37, 247–50; and the case of Allie Oulds v. Rita Haberman, 247–48; and the case of Wilhelmina Holliday v. Weinreb Management, 248–49 Commission on Interracial Cooperation (Atlanta), 214, 269 Commission on Training Camp Activities, 62, 262–63 Cook, Will Marion, 16 Coolidge, Calvin, 211 Cooper, A. Dean, 112–13 Coordinating Council of Negro Performers, 26, 30, 37, 82, 92, 267–68, 269 Country Club (St. Louis), 118 Creel Committee, 20, 264 Crisis, 91, 93, 95, 176 Crowley, Raymond L., 49 Curtis, Helen, 211 Curtis, Susan: and experiment in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Archives, 172–74, 192; and ghost stories, 7–8; and Liberia, 189, 199, 203; and race, 79–80, 89; and reading Bitter Canaan, 201–2 Dancy, John, 115 Daniels, Jonathan, 194 Davis, Benjamin O., 138 Davis, Jackson, 202

Index Davis, Natalie Zemon, 6 Davis, Ossie, 250 Day, Carita, 16 Day, Marion Moore, 99 Democratic Party, 25, 30, 35, 37, 47, 48– 49, 64, 143, 156–75, 269; and Colored Democrats, 129, 142; and Jefferson Club (St. Louis), 128–29, 162 Demos, John, 6 Denning, Michael, 30 De Priest, Oscar, 164 Dickson, Moses, 123, 254–55 Dillard, J. H., 182 Dilliard, Irving, 25, 54 Dirksen, Everett, 103 “Double-V Campaign,” 45, 106, 145 Douglas, Ann, 27 Dougherty, Romeo, 14 Downing, Rossa F., 103 Drake, St. Clair, 82 Du Bois, W. E. B., 24, 36, 37–38, 82, 85, 88, 109, 126, 127, 258, 264–65; friendship with Walton, 37, 152, 179; on Liberia, 208, 209, 210, 211, 215–16, 223–24; pan-African conferences, 225– 26, 241; and Souls of Black Folk, 241 Dudley, S. H. (Theatre Owner Booking Association), 130 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 125, 127 Dunbar Apartments, 98, 179, 246, 249, 250 Duncan, Isadora, 16 Duncan, Peter, 116 Dunn, James Clement, 196 Duse, Eleanora, 29 Dyer, Pat, 116 Early, Gerald, 108 East St. Louis, 55, 60, 64, 65, 253; Lincoln High School, 60; and riot in 1917, 259– 61 Eiges, Sydney, 4, 268 Eleazer, R. B., 214–15 Ellington, Duke, 268 Ellis, George Washington, 85 Ellison, Ralph, 201, 268 Elmes, Arthur Fletcher, 102, 104 Europe, James Reese, 27, 257 Exodusters, 253–55 Farley, James A., 34, 49, 143, 152, 171, 172–73 Farmer, Walter, 126

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Index Federal Employment Policy Committee (FEPC), 147, 173–75, 196 Ferguson, Jeffrey B., 27 Fernando Po, 200, 219 Fiddler, Harry, 18 Firestone, Harvey S., 39, 95, 96, 183, 186, 187, 191, 212–14, 216, 217, 222 Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 7, 136, 140, 166, 180, 183, 200, 203, 205, 207, 221, 223, 224 Fletcher, Frank, 253 Folk, Joseph, 111, 122, 160 Fortune, T. Thomas, 240 Foster, Bill, 51 Francis, David R., 126 Francis, W. T., 212 Freud, Sigmund, 154 Frissell, B. F., 261 Frogs, the, 15, 19, 257 Furniss, H.W., 86 Gabbin, Joanne V., 27 Gaines, Kevin K., 70 Garvey, Marcus, 202, 210, 266 Ghost as analytical category, 7–8 Ghost stories, 7–8 Ginzburg, Carlo, 6 Glen Echo Country Club (St. Louis), 118, 119–20, 121, 122 Goddu, Teresa, 8 Gothic, 8 Greeley Negro Democratic Club, 162 Greene, Graham, 219, 223–24; and Journey without Maps, 219–20 “Groundbreaking, The,” 100–106 Gun War of 1880–1881, 242 Haiti, 86–87, 137, 168, 198 Hall, Charles E., 143 Hammerstein, Oscar, 250 Hamner, Earl, Jr., 53 Handy, W. C., 166 Hapgood, Emilie, 22 Harlem Renaissance, 27, 266 Haunting, 8–9, 12–13, 106–7, 155, 244 Hayden, Scott, 130 Hayes, Roland Hayward, William, 266 Hoffman, Gertrude, 16 Hogan, Ernest, 16, 18, 22, 28, 30, 115, 123, 210, 256; and The Oyster Man, 16, 18; and Rufus Rastus, 123, 256; and Smart Set Company, 115

287 Holt, Nora Douglas, 72 Holtzclaw, W. H., 261 Hood, J. W., 115 Hoover, Herbert, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169 Horne, Lena, 250, 268 Howard University Glee Club, 104 Hull, Cordell, 137, 140, 187, 189, 190–91 Hurd, Carlos F., 259 Independent Movement, 64, 161–62 Ink Spots, the, 250, 268 Johnson, Charles Spurgeon, 199–202, 216 Johnson, Ernest, E., 226 Johnson, Henry, 263 Johnson, Jack, 43–44 Johnson, James Weldon, 109, 258 Johnson, Joseph L., 167 Johnson, Rosamond, 12, 28, 30 Johnson, Thomas, 257 Jolson, Al, 29 Jones, Percy D., 167 Jones, Thomas Jesse, 167, 182, 210, 213, 217, 251, 265 Joplin, Scott, 5, 11–16, 17, 23, 27, 49, 72, 121, 130–31, 160, 238, 272 Jordan, Joe, 121 Josephs, Robert, 267 Kafﬁr Rebellion, 242 Kafﬁrs, 210, 233–45 Keener, Sid, 73, 74–75 Kennedy, Ambrose J., 103 King, Charles D. B., 183, 211, 212 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 202 King Lobengula, 242 Kitt, Eartha, 250 Klaw, Marc, 62, 92 Krasner, David, 43 Kraton, Harry, 257 Kremer, Gary R., 27 Ku Klux Klan, 74, 156, 265 Lafayette Theater, 16, 257 Lasch, Christopher, 229 Le Breton, David M., 188 League of Nations, 36, 136, 200–201, 204, 218 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 50 Lewis, Arthur W., 235, 236, 240 Lewis, Theophilus, 14 Liberia and diamonds, 223, 224; diplomacy with the United States,

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288

Index

135–38, 176–205, 209–11, 217; economy of, 182, 184–86, 191, 193, 203–4, 221; and Finance Corporation, 216; and Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 95–96, 136, 140–41, 180, 183, 212–14, 216, 224; and hinterland administration, 141, 191, 216; history of, 199–204, 206–8; Kru uprising in, 183, 220–21; national autonomy and sovereignty of, 181–82, 193, 225; neoslavery controversy, 36, 136, 200–201, 203, 207, 211, 214; treaties with the United States, 136–37, 185, 187, 188; U.S. consumer culture and, 179–80; and World War II, 138–40, 183, 187–93, 205 Locke, Alain, 88 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 85, 124– 28, 131, 210, 233, 235 Lowman, Lawrence W., 38 Lyon, Ernest, 209, 210

NAACP, 81, 82, 162, 225, 250, 252, 260 Nail, John B., 19 National Negro Business League, 65, 82, 159, 182, 256, 269 Negro Actors Guild of America, 26, 93, 268 Negro Gold Star Mothers, 164–65 Negro Heritage Library, 25 Negro History Bulletin, 25, 158 Negro Protective League of St. Louis, 114 New York Age, 5, 11, 41–45, 52, 80, 81, 93, 256 New York Herald Tribune, 98, 166 New York World, 48, 63, 74, 132, 158, 159– 60, 232, 250–51, 265–66, 267 Nichols, Jack, 103 Normandie Country Club (St. Louis), 118, 122

McBride, Harry A, 48, 138–39, 142, 143, 146, 186, 191–92. McBride, Malcolm, 262–63 McCullagh, John A., 235 McKenna, Frank, 54, 64 McNutt, Paul, 174 Malby Act, 22 Malliet, A. M. Wendell, 146 Matabeles, 242 Mayberry, William, 235 Memory, 4–5, 9–10, 40, 88, 155, 232, 271– 72; and cognitive psychology, 28–29 Messenger, The, 52 Miami, 135, 137 Michaux, Solomon Lightfoot, 102, 104 Michelson, Charles, 48, 143, 166, 169, 170 Miller, Kelly, 88 Minton, Henry, 135 Mitchell, Abbie, 249 Mitchell, Arthur W., 167, 183 Montgomery, Isaiah T., 164 Moore, Frederick R., 52, 65, 66, 67, 158, 210, 256–57, 259, 266 Moore, R. Walton, 185 Morris, William (United Booking Agency), 130 Morton, Ferdinand Q., 158, 163 Moss, Richard, 117 Moton, Robert Russa, 159, 264 Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 164 Muckraking, 24, 114

Pan-African conferences, 225, 241. See also Du Bois, W. E. B.: pan-African conferences Parker, Araminta, 70, 71 Parker, Emily, 70 Parks, Rosa, 81 Patterson, Sam, 121, 129, 160, 238 Peabody, George Foster, 167, 171, 183, 217 Pearson, Drew, 45, 137 Phelps-Stokes, Anson, 183, 213 Phelps-Stokes Fund, 167, 187, 202, 211, 213, 217, 269 Phile, William D., 58–59 Pittsburgh Courier, 47, 144 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 81 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 266 Pulitzer, Ralph, 265

O’Neal, Fred, 267

Race, 76, 80–82, 84–85, 100, 110 Rainey, Julian, 167 Randolph, A. Philip, 37, 52, 144, 152, 159, 173 Randolph, Jennings, 103 Ransom, Reverdy, 49, 183, 187 Recorder of Deeds Building, Washington, D. C., 100 Reenactors, 230, 234–35, 242, 244–45, 255. See also Boer War Camp: and battle reenactments Republican Party, 41–43, 65, 116, 156, 157–58, 159, 161–62, 164; and “Lily Whitism,” 164

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Index Robert, Lawrence Wood, Jr., 103 Roberts, Luckyeth, 16, 266 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 249 Robinson, Jackie, 51 Rochester, Lester Walton, 247 Rochester, Percy, 135 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 98 Rogers, Alex, 257 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 25, 49, 96, 101, 102, 104, 132, 134–47, 159, 163–65, 170–74, 182, 189, 190, 195, 218, 221, 222 Roosevelt, Theodore, 69, 124, 130, 160, 161, 162, 165, 169 Russell, Rosalind, 250 Russell, Sylvester, 14 Rydell, Robert, 127–28 Sadler, General P. L., 190 St. Louis and Elleardsville (“The Ville”), 55, 63–65, 122; Four Courts in, 75, 111– 12; golﬁng in, 48, 117–23; St. Peter’s Cemetery in, 57 St. Louis Athletic Club, 118 St. Louis Palladium, 236 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 48, 73, 113, 132 St. Louis Star, 74–75, 109, 111–23, 160, 256 Scarborough, W. S., 127, 233, 236 Schuyler, George S., 27, 204, 209, 215, 219, 223–24; and Slaves Today, 219 Scott, Emmett J., 126–27, 152, 159, 233, 236, 238, 262, 263, 264 Scott, William Edouard, 100–106 Segregation in New York theaters, 22 Shawneetown, Illinois, 6, 55, 56 n., 57– 61, 239, 246, 260; and Ridgway National Bank, 55, 58, 60 Simpson, C. L., 141, 188, 206 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 225 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 203 Sissle, Noble, 266 Slavery, 8, 13, 60–61, 116, 120–21, 163, 205, 206, 214, 230, 238, 239–40, 246 Smith, Al, 163 Smith, Madison R., 86 Smith, William, 235 Smith, Willietha, 235, 240 Sobol, Louis, 28 Society of Silurians, 48, 132 Soga, A. Kirkland, 244 Sousa, John Philip, 125 Southern Africa, 240–42, 244 Spanish-American War, 69 Stanﬁeld, John, 202 Stark, John, 130

289 Steedman, Carolyn, 31 Stewart, Harrison, 18 Street, Nancy, 57–58 Street, Nancy J., 58 Strother, William, 112–14 Sullivan, Ed, 48 Sumner High School (St. Louis, Missouri), 54, 68, 70, 93, 112 Sweets, N. A., 136 Swope, Herbert Bayard, 34, 69, 73–74, 117–18, 152, 166, 186, 223, 232, 247, 265 Taft, William Howard, 210 Tandy, Charleton H., 254–55 Tanguay, Eva, 16 Taylor, William E., 105 Thomas, Danny, 250 Thompkins, William J., 100, 102, 104, 106, 167, 168 Thompson, Charles, 202 Toney, Charles, 165 Torrence, Ridgely, 21, 52, 258–59 Trauma, 51, 230–31, 259 Treemonisha, 14 Truman, Harry S, 103, 175, 195 Tubman, William V. S., 136, 137–38, 195, 218 Turner, Charles, 129 Turner, Henry, 207 Turner, James Milton, 27, 64, 72, 129, 161–62, 210, 254–55 Turner, Rev. John, 254 Turpin, Charles, 71 Turpin, Nannie, 72 Turpin, Tom, 70–72 Tuskegee Institution, 65, 158, 166, 211, 256, 264, 269 U.S. Civil War, 230–31, 237–39, 245, 261 Uggams, Leslie, 250 Um-Kalali, 241–44 United Colored Democracy (New York City), 158, 163 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 202, 266 Vandercook, John W., 207 VanDerZee, James, 96–98 Vann, Robert, 47, 146, 167, 168 Van Vechten, Carl, 29 Vashon, George, 161 Viljoen, Benjamin Johannes, 234, 238–39 Villard, Henry S., 188, 195, 196

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290 “Ville, The,” 55, 63–65, 122. See also St. Louis and Elleardsville (“The Ville”) Visser, Peter James, 234 Voice of the Negro, 126–27, 233, 238 Von Tilzer, Harry, 22 Wagner, Robert F., 25, 183, 247 Wald, Priscilla, 14 Waldridge, Cyrus, 160 Walker, Aida Overton, 12, 16, 17, 18, 30; in Bandanna Land, 16; as “Salome,” 16 Walker, George, 12, 18, 22, 29, 30, 44–45, 99, 210 Walker, Jimmy, 266 Walker, Walter, 187 Walters, Alexander, 241 Walton, Benjamin A., Jr., 54, 269–70 Walton, Benjamin A., Sr., 54, 56, 57, 58, 60–65, 252, 253, 254 Walton, Gladys Moore, 65–69, 96, 177, 179, 180, 184, 256–57, 269 Walton, Gladys Odile, 177, 184, 249, 257 Walton Julia (Julia O. Walton Reagin), 54, 57, 61, 269 Walton, Lester A.: capitalizing “Negro,” 22, 39, 83, 84–90, 108, 132, 258; and the Civil Rights Movement, 5, 147, 154, 249–50; and the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers, 26, 30, 37, 82, 92, 267–68, 269; as a drama critic, 11–13, 14, 15–25, 30, 41–43, 132; as a golf reporter in St. Louis, 48, 117–23, 125, 128; and Harvey S. Firestone, 39, 141, 166, 212–14, 217–18; as historian, 24; and the Johnson Amusement Company, 257; journalistic style of, 40–46, 112, 114; on the legation in Monrovia, 141–42, 179; and Liberia, 5, 9, 26, 47–48, 51, 76, 82, 91, 98–99, 132, 134–48, 53, 168, 176–205, 210–26; as a member of the Commission on Intergroup Relations, 26, 37, 76, 82, 247–50, 269; as press agent for the Republic of Liberia, 34, 218; as publicity director for Colored Democrats, 5, 26, 30, 48–49, 142, 157– 75; as a reporter at the Four Courts (St. Louis), 111–12; on special assignment for FDR, 134–48, 192–93; and the Walton Publishing Company,

Index 257–58; and World War I, 45–46, 210– 11, 258–59, 262–65; and World War II, 9, 96, 139–47, 170–71, 187–93 Walton, Lucille (Lucille Walton Garrett), 54, 180–81 Walton, Marjorie May (Marjorie Walton Rochester), 177, 184, 257 Walton, Nancy (Nancy Walton Douglas), 54, 180–81, 269 Walton, Olive May Camphor, 54, 56–61, 62, 63, 65, 180, 239, 246, 253, 254, 269 Waltons, The, 53–54 Warwick, Peter, 243 Washington, Booker T., 20, 41–43, 125, 126, 127, 130, 158–59, 161, 256, 264 Waters, Ethel, 30 Watson, Edwin M., 135, 142, 170, 174 Watson, James, 165, 166 Welles, Sumner, 138–39, 142, 143, 146, 189, 191–92 Wesley, H. Too, 211 Westermann, Diedrich, 224 White, Walter, 80, 265 White, William Allen, 119 Willcox, William, 89 Wilson, J. Finley, 104, 129, 159, 160 Williams, Bert, 12, 17, 20, 28, 29, 30, 210; in Mr. Lode of Koal, 17 Williams, Eric, 202 Williams, H. Sylvester, 241 Williams and Walker, 20 Wilson, Woodrow, 24, 25, 74, 163, 210; and segregation of the capital, 86, 162 Wing, M. J., 226 Winslow, Max, 22 World War I, 251, 258–58, 261; and Commission on Training Camp Activities, 62, 262–63; and Committee on Public Information, 20, 263; and Versailles Peace Conference, 264–65 World War II, 187–93, 205; African American morale during, 134–48, 192; Labor Battalions, 170–71 World’s Columbian Exposition, 85, 127 Young, Artee Felicita, 17, 25 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 29 Zulus, 242