Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council

282 Pages·2008·4.73 MB·English

by  Benjamin R Justesen

The Rise
and Fall
of the
National
Afro-American
Council
Benjamin R. Justesen
Broken Brotherhood
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the rise
and fall of the
national afro-american
council
Benjamin R. Justesen
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale
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Copyright © 2008 Benjamin R. Justesen
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 08 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Justesen, Benjamin R., 1949–
Broken brotherhood : the rise and fall of the National
Afro-American Council / Benjamin R. Justesen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2843-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8093-2843-7 (alk. paper)
1.National Afro-American Council—History. 2.African Americans—
Civil rights—History. 3.Civil rights movements—United States—History.
4. African Americans—History—1877–1964. 5. United States—Race relations.
6.Racism—United States—History. I. Title.
E185.61.J88 2008
323.1196073—dc22 2007028609
Printed on recycled paper.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞
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For Beth and Wayne
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Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xv
Introduction: The Four Titans 1
1. Resurrecting the League: Rochester, 1898 8
2. The Black Judases: Washington, D.C., 1898 16
3. All Eyes on McKinley: Chicago, 1899 38
4. Playing at Presidential Politics: Indianapolis, 1900 53
5. Nowhere Else to Turn: Philadelphia, 1901 83
6. Fortune at the Helm: Saint Paul, 1902 101
7. Dueling Portraits: Louisville, 1903 121
8. Enduring the Interregnum: Saint Louis, 1904 141
9. Walters Redux: Detroit, 1905 152
10. Competing with Niagara: New York City, 1906 168
11. Farewell to the Wizard: Baltimore, 1907 184
Epilogue: Slouching toward Columbus 202
Appendix: National Afro-American Council Constitution 211
Notes 215
Bibliography 243
Index 251
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Preface
I first became interested in the National Afro-American Council in the late
1990s, while writing a biography of North Carolina congressman George Henry
White, an unsuccessful early aspirant to the group’s presidency. As with other
aspects of White’s life, I found clues to the Council’s origins and activities but
little documented evidence of its activities or prominence. Most historians who
discussed the Council had dismissed it as primarily, if not exclusively, a vehicle
of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Machine and all but ignored the
Council as otherwise irrelevant to the period. Like other groups of the period,
the Council at first seemed a victim of the developing ideological chasm within
the ranks of African American leaders.
Years later, when I returned to this subject, my initial research efforts were re-
warded with a surprising number of detailed newspaper accounts of the Council’s
annual meetings, both in African American weekly newspapers—where I had
expected to find the accounts—and in a large number of mainstream daily news-
papers, where I had not expected to find either extensive or neutral coverage of
the meetings. In every city where it met over its decade of existence, the Council
received long, generally (and uncharacteristically) objective accounts from the
white newspapers—accounts far more balanced, in fact, than from the black
newspapers, which were often split between expressions of devoted membership
and derisive scorn, depending on the partisan loyalty of the editor.
Because no official records could be located for the Council after the first
three years, these newspaper accounts quickly became the only viable option
for reconstructing the later history of this long-dead organization. Limited cor-
respondence between Council leaders and others was available and proved to
be a rich secondary source for opinion, if not factual detail; but the absence of
collected private papers for several of the principals made the search arduous.
Memoirs by such key players as Alexander Walters, Mary Church Terrell, Ida
Wells-Barnett, and John Green revealed their surprisingly selective memory
for detail. Many of the most active members barely mentioned the Council at
all, while others, like William E. B. Du Bois, bitterly disenchanted by Tuskegee
machinations, all but glossed over their own membership in obvious favor of
ix
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