Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (52 page)

Philip White was not involved in the Bethel Literary Association, but he took an active role in the Brooklyn Literary Union. He attended meetings regularly, was a featured speaker, and gave sizable financial contributions. When president Stewart asked at the end of a meeting for a collection to support the free lecture course, he turned first to Philip, who made out a check that covered the cost of the entire evening.
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Unlike Bethel Literary, the Brooklyn Literary Union favored the lecture format over debates. Much like its predecessor, the union’s lecturers were exclusively male and covered similar topics. The most frequent, and popular, speakers were Philip, T. McCants Stewart, T. Thomas Fortune, and George Downing. Occasionally, whites were invited to speak. In 1887, former Brooklyn mayor Seth Low delivered a paper on the politically safe topic of “Libraries—Ancient and Modern.” In contrast, Philip and his friends addressed politically controversial
subjects. My great-grandfather adopted the Washingtonian position that favored black economic development, arguing that “the Negro must work out his future on race lines, organizing and sustaining his own enterprises.” To do so, Philip argued, black businessmen needed to adopt the standpoint of capital and protectionism over labor and free trade, both of which Fortune strongly backed.
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You’ll notice that I haven’t yet mentioned the names of any women. That’s because at the union their voices were hardly heard. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, because women provided musical entertainment at meetings. In the 1880s, classical musical education was increasingly part of the Colored Public School curriculum. Eager to provide further musical opportunities for young and old alike, Philip and his friends founded the Mendelssohn School of Music, where his oldest daughter Ellie was a teacher. A popular composer in the United States at the time, Felix Mendelssohn gave his name to New York’s most renowned choral society, the Mendelssohn Glee Club. Yet even though Ellie, Maritcha, and her good friend Dr. Susan McKinney were assiduous members of the Brooklyn Literary Union, they were encouraged to display their musical talents only: Susan organized musical events, Maritcha conducted choral singing, and Ellie played the piano.

I have no explanation for the diminished role of women in the Brooklyn Literary Union, but it must have been galling to them. Eventually, however, change did occur. In early 1891, a journalist and social activist, Victoria Earle Matthews, spoke on the topic of “Stoic Philosophy.” She was followed a few months later by Fannie Jackson Coppin, an Oberlin graduate and principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, who gave a lecture on “Labor and Education” moderated by Susan McKinney. In December, at the conclusion of a paper on “Digestive Ferments” delivered by Dr. W. A. Morton, Susan McKinney rose to challenge him, complaining that he should have “treated the subject physiologically rather than pathologically.” A year after that the venerable Frances Harper stood on the union’s platform to deliver a paper on “Enlightened Motherhood.” “The novelty of the occasion,” according to the
Age
, was not so much Harper’s presence as the fact that “a lady, Miss M. R. Lyons, presided.”
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Examine the photograph of Maritcha Lyons taken sometime after she was named assistant principal of Public School 83 in Brooklyn. She’s matured into a large-bosomed, imposing, almost regal woman. She’s gazing beyond the camera with a determined and purposeful look. She appears self-possessed, even self-satisfied.

I’m finally able to turn to Maritcha’s memoir, not to ferret out information about “the gentlemen in black” as her father called his generation, but to glean what she had to say about her own life, aspirations, and achievements. The result is a portrait of a “new woman” emerging from the black community at century’s end.

By the time this photograph was taken, Maritcha had fulfilled her childhood ambition to become a first-class teacher, building on a long tradition of black schoolmarms beginning with Rebecca Peterson, Sarah Ennalls, Eliza Richards, Fanny Tompkins, and others. In her memoir, Maritcha went to great lengths to give credit to all the mentors who helped her at every step of the way. In childhood, there were her parents, who “made over a sickly, peevish, unproposing [
sic
] girl into a woman with a new lease on life”; they sacrificed so that she could “attain what was regarded in my youth as a liberal education for a woman.” Later came her teachers. Maritcha paid special tribute to Charles Reason, who gave her an education that was exceptional for women at the time. Strict and “intolerant of mediocrity,” Reason, Maritcha asserted, demanded that his students submit to his way of teaching and thinking. Those who did developed “a love of study for study’s sake. … Whoever could be trained to enjoy what he enjoyed in the way it pleased him had measureless content as complete as exceptional.”

By Reason’s side, Maritcha placed three of his female colleagues. The first two were Helen Appo and Mary Anderson, assistant teachers who ensured Maritcha’s “steady, systematic advance” as a student. The third was “Reason’s most gifted and brilliant pupil,” Mary Eato, who, Maritcha intimated, fulfilled obligations well beyond her job description without ever receiving recognition. As Reason’s assistant, Eato
functioned as de facto principal when age slowed down the venerable old man, and “shouldered the responsibility of conserving the reputation and service of the institution in which formerly a pupil, she had become a teacher.”
⁷
After Reason’s death, however, she was denied the official position of principal.

Maritcha Lyons, circa 1900, by an anonymous photographer (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)

The same year of her high school graduation, Maritcha applied for a position in Brooklyn’s public school system. Even then she continued to be mentored, as “neophytes in teaching” were encouraged to take private classes. Unlike Brooklyn’s public schools, which were still segregated, these courses, because private, were integrated. Taught by seasoned educators, they covered such subjects as elocution, arithmetic, geometry, voice culture and oral reading, and psychological studies.
Classes in the natural sciences were held Saturday mornings at the Natural History Museum.

Throughout her long career, Maritcha devoted herself to elementary education. She began at Colored School number 1, later P.S. 67, where Charles Dorsey, another member of Brooklyn’s black elite, was principal and the much admired Georgiana Putnam was assistant principal. There, Maritcha progressed from teaching the lowest primary grade to instructing the graduating class. Ten years later, she was hired as the assistant principal of P.S. 83 under Frank Harding, a “skilled trainer of teachers” whose further mentoring helped her become, in her own words, “useful and efficient.”

By the time she wrote her memoir in 1928, Maritcha had developed a well-defined set of teaching principles. Grounded in her long years of experience, they are a paean to the possibilities offered by what she called the “Little Red Schoolhouse of Greater New York.” Recognizing that elementary education was the full extent of what the majority of children—black or white, native born or immigrant—would receive, Maritcha saw herself as providing “the education of the masses rather than of the classes.” But she never thought of the masses in the way the trustees of the African Free Schools had in bygone years. To her, the masses were made up of individual students, each one of whom needed nurturing rather than disciplining. In Maritcha’s view, there were three essential components to their education: information, which included not only book knowledge but also critical thinking; elevation, or moral development and the formation of personality; and the cultivation of the mind-body connection, in which control over muscles would lead to greater mental readiness and concentration.

In her capacity as assistant principal, Maritcha honored those who had mentored her by becoming a mentor herself. She was put in charge of training students in “practical schoolroom responsibility,” and had the pleasure of seeing “my girls” obtain permanent teaching positions. “The success of the last two decades,” Maritcha wrote, “is in no small measure due to their intelligence and whole-souled devotion to striving to visualize and realize what is the ultimate aim of proper teaching.”
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I mark 1892 as the year Maritcha moved beyond the female sphere of elementary school teaching into political activism. That was the year she debated Ida B. Wells and, in her own words, “won the plaudits of the members of the Brooklyn Literary Union.”
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I wish she had said more about the event. Although Maritcha described Wells as “the afterwards famous lecturer against lynching,” she never specified the topic debated or her line of argument. Instead, Maritcha focused on two, perhaps more feminine, issues: the “valued friendship” that subsequently arose between the two women and the mentorship in “extempore speaking” that she extended to Wells.

Wells was the galvanizing force that propelled Brooklyn’s black women into public activism. Her story is well known. Originally from Mississippi, Wells moved to Memphis in the early 1880s and embarked on a career in journalism. In 1889 she became editor and partner of the
Free Speech
, publishing militant editorials against the practice of lynching that was sweeping the South and praising those blacks who resisted. In 1892, lynching hit close to home. Three of Wells’s Memphis friends opened a grocery store, which was ordered closed after it started taking business away from a white grocer across the street. When deputies arrived to enforce the order, a group of black men defiantly defended the store; in the melee that ensued, one of the deputies was shot and seriously wounded. Scores of blacks were rounded up and jailed, while the three grocers were lynched. Wells wrote a series of angry editorials condemning lynching. Provoked into a fury, the local newspaper, speaking on behalf of Memphis’s white citizens, called for
her
—or, since they assumed she was a man,
his
—lynching. It was necessary, the paper insisted, to “brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”
¹⁰

Wells, however, had left town and headed north. Reaching New York, she was met by my grandfather and Fortune, who invited her to continue her anti-lynching campaign in the pages of the
Age.
Brooklyn’s women joined in. “Two colored women,” Wells recalled in her memoir, “said they thought that the women of New York and Brooklyn should do something to show appreciation of my work and to protest the treatment
which I had received.”
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These two women were Maritcha and Victoria Earle Matthews. Bringing their friends and acquaintances together, they decided to raise money so that Wells could start her paper again.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and civil rights activist, photograph by Oscar B. Willis, 1893–94 (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)

To that end, the women organized a testimonial dinner for Wells that was held at Lyric Hall on October 5, 1892 (probably around the time of her Brooklyn Literary Union debate with Maritcha). More than two hundred attended; they were, according to Wells, the “best womanhood” of New York and Brooklyn, joined by friends from Boston and Philadelphia. No expense was spared. An electric light at the back of the platform spelled out Wells’s pen name, “Iola.” The programs were
miniature copies of the
Free Speech.
Ushers and committee members wore white silk badges lettered with “Iola.” Floral arrangements included a horn of plenty.
¹²

In her memoir, Wells spent several pages reminiscing about the event. Barely commenting on the content of her speech, she simply mentioned that she told the story of her friends’ lynching and attempted to account for the “cause of the trouble at home.” She dwelled at much greater length on the emotions her speech stirred up in both herself and her audience. Giving in to “woman’s weakness,” she wept until tears coursed down her cheeks, causing her an embarrassment that doubled once she realized she was without a handkerchief. But it was this very display of emotion, audience members later told her, that “did more to convince cynical and selfish New York of the seriousness of the lynching situation than anything else could have done.” For Wells, the event was a financial success; the organizers raised five hundred dollars on her behalf and also presented her with a gold brooch in the shape of a pen, “an emblem of my chosen profession.” But it was also a professional success, launching Wells’s career as a public activist and speaker.