Jim Crow in Columbia

Columbians who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s and survived to a ripe age often talked about race in a way that embarrassed their grandchildren. “There were some lovely, lovely black people,” an elderly white woman recalled in 1994. “They were the old-type black people. Polite, nice, kind, respectful. They wouldn’t dare whistle at a woman. They wouldn’t dare even look at them too closely. They were very respectful. They worked at menial tasks. They had their place, and they knew where their place was and stayed there.”

Another white woman of the same age remembered her parents’ distress about the relationship between the black woman who worked for them and some liberals from Kansas who had recently moved into the neighborhood. “He taught psychology at Stephens and his wife taught I can’t remember what at Christian College. Nola started working part time for those professors, and Mother went over one day to borrow a cup of sugar at noontime. She came home terribly upset and she announced to my father that Nola was eating at the Rexroths, and sitting at the dining room table, and she said, ‘I’m afraid they are going to ruin Nola.’”

“There wasn’t any racism” in those days, a retired white businessman insisted. “I’d never heard of racism until 1960. There wouldn’t be any racism if it wasn’t for Lyndon Johnson and all those damned liberals. There was absolutely no racism. We had all black guys working for us. We loved them.... They drank a little bit and they didn’t sometimes come to work. But every single one of them will tell you they loved me.”

“You were indoctrinated,” a black woman explained, “so that you knew the white people had their position and you had your position. I think Dunbar—he was one of the black poets—said it better than anybody else. ‘We wear a mask that grins and lies.’ To the white people, we wore that mask.”

Lovina Scott Ebbe was the daughter of missionaries and had grown up in India. She recalled a day in 1928 when she was returning from junior high school with two of her new Columbia friends—three white schoolgirls walking side by side and filling the sidewalk completely. “I could see two dark brown people coming toward us. I was on the outside, and I stepped into strip of grass that grows along the street. My friend, who was walking in the middle of us three, grabbed my arm and pulled me back on the sidewalk. “Don’t ever do that!” she said. “You never get off the sidewalk for a darkie! They’re darkies and they have to remember it! Don’t ever do that again!”

Lorene Bangert Emmerson, newly arrived in Columbia in 1938, bought a ticket at the Hall Theater and climbed the long exterior stair to the balcony. “An usher came up and said to me, ‘Little girl, you can’t sit here.’ And I answered, ‘Well, why can’t I sit here?’ He was a little embarrassed. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Only colored people sit up here. You have to sit downstairs.’ So I moved.” Ten years later, she was working as a residence hall counselor at Stephens College. Every day Emmerson arrived at the same time as the maid everyone called Matty.

She was an elderly lady, so I would stand back and open the door for her, but she wouldn’t go ahead of me. And we’d have this terrible, terrible time. I couldn’t get her to walk in front of me, you know, and I was horrified, because she looked like she was 70 or 80. She seemed ancient to me. Her skin was a kind of ashy gray, and she had a peculiar color of orange hair that kind of stuck out straight. I didn’t think her health was good. I’d always be trying to walk behind Matty or to open a door for her when we were in the hall.

Finally one day she said, “I want you to meet my niece.” She brought her niece up to the desk, and the girl was colored. Matty had realized that I didn’t realize she was a black person, and that since she was a black person, I should never hold the door open for her, you know, and she should never walk in front of me.

“You had the black community complete within itself and the white community complete within itself,” a black woman remembered.

“It was called Nigger Town where black people lived,” a white man said. “It was like going into a different country. You wouldn’t necessarily be unwelcome, but you wouldn’t know what to do once you got there.”

“There were shanties you would keep chickens in and not people.” said another. “You can’t imagine dogs living there.”

“I knew a man who must have owned forty or fifty of those shacks. The first of every month, he went down there with a half-bushel basket on his arm, a basket with a little towel in the bottom. He used it to collect rent. He’d pull the towel back when they gave him rent, put the money in there, and then put the towel back. Most of them, I imagine, would be paying five or ten dollars a month, and it was all cash. I’ve seen that basket full of money, with the towel laying on top, and he was on his way to the bank.”

 “Columbia had a big, big population of black people, always has.”

“Less than 5% of the population were black.”

 “I don’t know what the statistics were, but I don’t think the percentage of black people in our community was very large at that time.”

“I suspect that in those days they probably made up about a third of Columbia’s population.”

“Sharp End was where all the black people went to get drunk, and you didn’t dare go through there in the night because they got wild and they resented the white people”

“White guys would go down there at night and they would get to drinking and going into those places, and then they would roll them and take their billfolds. You’d go up on the roofs of those buildings and these old billfolds would be laying up there after they’d taken the money out of them.”

“There were so few you didn’t notice them, and they all seemed to be very nice.”

In 1937, Audrey Kittel, a 25-year-old graduate student at the all-white University of Missouri, decided to conduct a systematic study of the black community. She began her field research in early July by interviewing members of the professional class—a doctor, a dentist, an undertaker, three ministers, five schoolteachers, and the editor of the weekly black newspaper. These leaders of the community, she thought, would be in a position to give her an overview. Most of them lived two or three blocks north of Broadway, on Fourth and Fifth Streets.

Unlike many of her fellow students at the University of Missouri, Audrey Kittel wasn’t from a comfortably middle-class background. She had lived until recently in tenement housing in St. Louis after her parents lost their jobs as public school teachers there. It had been a neighborhood of factory workers, junk recyclers, and hat makers—some of them Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Her parents had been forced for a time to take government relief, and even now the family was living in a crowded boarding house at the edge of campus. The homes she visited on Fourth and Fifth Streets struck her as opulent by comparison. Typically, there would be a vase of flowers placed near the front door, a mahogany smoking table, an overstuffed couch, silk lampshades, tinted photographs hanging at eye-level on the walls. Almost all the families had telephones, which the Kittel family did not. In the sectional bookcases, beside the books and the candlesticks, were copies of The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Literary Digest, and Harpers’. In some homes she saw “conveniences” that “bordered on the luxurious”: one man owned a neatly landscaped brick bungalow, a fine car, and—to Kittel’s amazement—three radios. He had a full-time housekeeper and an annual clothing budget that exceeded the Kittel family’s annual rent.

A sociologist in training, Kittel had prepared an interview schedule with questions about work, finances, leisure, home life, religion, and education. At the end, she included a few questions about race relations. These turned loose a torrent of talk.

Joe Louis always came up. Just two weeks before, he had met James Braddock in a heavyweight championship fight. Three of the professional men had been so excited about the fight that they had bought tickets and driven to Chicago to watch it. A clergymen who had not gone said that he couldn’t approve of boxing because of its brutality, but he heartily approved of Joe Louis as a “public hero and a representative of the race.” Louis went down briefly in the first round, but won by knockout in the eighth, setting off celebrations in the black sections of cities nationwide. Within a few days film of the fight had reached Columbia, but it went only to the strictly segregated Uptown Theater. For four successive evenings it played to all-white audiences before or after the regular feature. Only on the fifth night, a Wednesday, did the proprietor offer a special screening for the black community. It was to be at midnight, after the white customers had plenty of time to exit the evening show.

As expected, the seats were packed by midnight, but the professional class stayed away almost to a person. “Imagine the irony of it,” one man told her. “Here’s a Negro boy fighting a white man that he beat the hell out of, but we can’t even get in to see it until the whites are through.”

“None of our people ever got in that place before except with a mop or a scrub brush,” one of the wives told Kittel, “and then they let us in at midnight after everybody else? I can’t understand why they went. I wouldn’t care how much that picture meant to me, I wouldn’t go under that kind of arrangement; not on a bet!”

“We’d have liked to have seen the pictures, all right,” the wife of a schoolteacher told Kittel, “but we wouldn’t go. I don’t like the set-up. After everybody else had seen them earlier in the evening, they let us in at midnight!”

 The professional class saw in Columbia’s racial “set-up” or “arrangement” dozens of small insults: restaurants they couldn’t enter; some theaters that excluded them, others that charged them full price and then sent them through separate doorways into inferior seats; shops that would sell a dress to a black woman, but wouldn’t allow her to try it on for size. Merchants in Columbia took it as a self-evident truth that clothes once worn by blacks were damaged goods. A woman buying a hat couldn’t put it on her own head to see how it looked, but had to ask a white salesgirl to model it for her.

Blacks couldn’t enter Columbia’s ballpark through the main gate. They ducked in through a hole in the fence at the far end of the field and sat on separate benches. The arrangement was the same when a white team was playing a black one, or even when two black teams played. Even then the blacks entered through the hole in the fence and stayed out of the empty bleachers reserved for whites. When a foot of heavy, late snow had fallen last March, the city had left in on the downtown streets until the complaints of white citizens grew loud, then shoveled it off and dumped it into the streets and yards of a black neighborhood.

The racial situation poisoned the happiness of the black professionals and their spouses. On their summer vacations they left Missouri and traveled north to golf and play tennis, to swim in public pools and to enjoy themselves in ballparks and theaters where there were no Jim Crow bleachers or separate midnight screenings.

After visiting these well-to-do households, Kittel began to canvass the larger community. Her plan was to knock on every seventh door in the central black district, where about 3000 people lived. At first glance, the streets she walked along had “a certain rustic charm, not yet contaminated by industrial life.” The unpaved streets and footpaths, the comparative absence of cars, the barefoot children playing: these seemed to belong to the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth. As summer dragged on, however, she noted that this “charm has certain drawbacks from the hygienic standpoint.” Many of the residents couldn’t pay for trash collection, so rats and dogs scavenged piles of garbage in the yards or roadside ditches. Few of the houses had indoor toilets. An open sewer flanked by outhouses ran from one end of the neighborhood to the other before sinking into a culvert at the edge of the Douglass School grounds. En route, it passed directly beneath the windows of many of the residences, and the barefoot children of the neighborhood found it “a fascinating place to play.”

The streets were covered with cinders from the city’s coal-fired power plants. As she walked on them or on the irregular paths beside them, every breeze or passing automobile raised a cloud of dust. When the breeze died, the swirling dust found a “final resting place on the walls, both inside and outside, of the sorry affairs which Columbia’s Negro population calls home. Vines and flowers which many of the people try to raise around their homes, as well as trees and woods, all look dirty and dull under their heavy coatings of black dust.”

The houses that lined the streets were small and boxlike, separated by a few feet from their neighbors, with a patch of ground in front and behind. Some had never been painted, on others the paint was peeling badly. Screens clung, “grimly” she thought, to one or two windows of a typical house, but the other screens were long gone. The wooden panels of the front doors were scuffed and cracked.  “Negro property is a fine investment,” a landlord had explained to her, “because you don’t have any upkeep expense.” She stepped up to a door and knocked.

Sometimes the person who answered was unhappy to see her. Her explanation of her project didn’t always help. “It’s bad enough,” one woman complained, “to have to work the way I do and get nothin’ for it, without havin’ to spend the little bit of time I get to set at home tellin’ somebody like you all my troubles.”

Another woman gave her a steely look and invited her inside reluctantly. The interior of the house was typical of many that she would see that summer:  no living room or parlor, just a kitchen with a coal stove, thin partitions to mark two or three bedrooms, walls with holes through the plaster. “The furniture,” she noted, “jibes harmoniously with the surrounding walls. Rusty iron beds and old wooden chairs and tables ... crooked statuettes and pictures, perhaps once gaudy.” Kittel’s interviews were leisurely and detailed, lasting an hour or two, and she was obviously a good listener. Gradually, the woman with the steely gaze began to let down her guard. “Did I look at you mean when you first come up?” she asked.

I reckon I did, but I’ll tell you why. White folks is always comin’ round here tryin’ to sell somethin’ that’s no good or tryin’ to get your money away from you some way.

One time a white man come up here, said he was a divine healer. He took a look at me and he said, “You’ve got heart trouble.” And sure enough, I has got heart trouble, so I thought maybe he knowed something, and I told him to set down.

So then he started tellin’ me my sickness was on account of a hair in this vein, or somethin’ he called it, in my neck. He said somebody done it by voodoo, and I asked him who, and he said my husband’s mother done it. Why I ain’t never even seen my husband’s mother, so I knowed it was a fake. I talked right up to him and told him to get on out.

Well, I tell you, after that I was scared to death. Every time somebody knocked on the door I’d get the little boy here or somebody to answer ’cause I was afraid it might’ve been him back here again. You know you can’t tell what might happen to you when you get sassy with a white man.

By summer’s end, Kittel had visited 86 blue-collar households. She had talked with truckers, quarrymen, cooks, janitors, chauffeurs, hod-carriers, and laundresses. Her interviews indicated that, contrary to the “pontifical judgments” of many white Columbians, these weren’t people averse to work or to marriage. Eighty-two of the 86 homes were occupied by couples married for five years or more. Husbands and wives worked an average of 55 hours weekly between them, generally in jobs they had held for more than two years.

 Coal miners, she learned, were in the vanguard of the working class. Like their white comrades, they earned 25¢ an hour, subscribed to the United Mine Workers’ Journal, and talked earnestly about class struggle and worker solidarity. Cooks averaged 18¢, as did maids who worked full time (48 hours per week) in wealthy households. Janitors averaged 12¢, and “houseworkers” on day wages made 9¢. The average income per household was $9.86 per week. Of this, $4.76 went for food, $2.25 for rent, $1.05 for water, light and coal, and 75¢ for insurance. On average 30¢ a week went into the collection plate at church. Even those who didn’t attend church sometimes sent donations with neighbors who did.  

Shoes came up several times as a cause of concern. Clothes could be made a home or reworked from castoffs or bought at rummage sales, but shoes cost real money. “Every year,” a widowed mother of five schoolchildren told Kittel, “I just don’t see how I’ll get shoes for ’em, but something turns up.” Phone service was expensive. Most working families did without it, but some of the low-wage houseworkers saw it as a necessity: “Lots of times” one explained, “it means a day’s work that I’d just lose if they couldn’t call me.”

After these inflexible expenses were paid, the average family might have 30-40¢ left for discretionary spending. Admission to the Hall and the Missouri theaters ran 15¢ apiece for matinees and 25¢ for evening shows, which included vaudeville acts. At that price for inferior segregated seating, most of Columbia’s blacks saw movies as a luxury they could afford to do without. Entertainment in the pool halls of the Sharp End, the tiny black business district, was cheap in more ways that one; church-goers and other respectable people steered clear of the area. Many of the people Kittel talked with fished and hunted—not only the men but the women—and sometimes families picnicked in the woods, gathering greens and berries when they did. “Neighboring,” however, was the chief leisure-time activity. Neighbors were in and out of each others’ houses all day long, lending and borrowing, catching up on the news, playing cards or dominoes, watching children for parents who were away at work. Kittel became accustomed to interviews in which a neighbor or two would

... drop in, take a chair, and without greeting of any kind, simply sit down and listen with an appearance of mild interest while such matters as income, expenditures and other more or less personal information was being discussed. Sometimes, after a while, the intruder would get up and start out, not a word having been exchanged since her arrival. At this point, the heretofore indifferent hostess would look up in concern and ask something like “where you goin’, Mary?” “Just goin’ home to set the beans off the stove I’ll be back” or some similar explanation was the usual reply. Then, assured of a prompt return, the hostess would settle back contented to continue the conversation.

Though electric wires looped through the neighborhood, about a third of the families had no lights. “Yeah, the place is wired,” one woman explained, “but we ain’t been able to get it turned on yet. As soon as we gets 35¢ together that we don’t need worser for sumpthin’ else, I guess we’ll get it put on.” Only one house in four had an indoor toilet; only one in five a bathtub. Five of the houses had no running water at all: the residents borrowed from a neighbor’s outdoor tap.

Among the poorest of the poor were a few women old enough to have been born into slavery. One of them lived alone in a one-room shack infested by mice. She used a discarded orange crate as a cupboard and went to bed before dark to avoid having to buy coal oil for her lamp. On her walls were small photos of her children and grandchildren and a large, neatly framed newspaper picture of Abraham Lincoln.

A 77-year-old woman lived with her husband on an old-age pension of $11 a month. On the day Kittel visited her, the woman declared solemnly, “I’m not like Mr. Rockefeller.”

It wasn’t John D. Rockefeller’s money that she was thinking of, but his death. He had died that spring, two years short of his stated goal of 100 years. “I’ve no set age I want to live to,” the woman told Kittel. “When the Lord calls me I’ll be ready.” A breeze blew through the doorway, stirring up the dust, and the woman began to cough. She told her husband to shut the door, and then pointed through the window to the flowers in her dusty garden. “Those flowers there,” she assured Kittel, “are just nothing to what they have in Heaven. They’ve got all kinds of flowers in Heaven.”

 “I’m getting out of here just as soon as I can,” one interviewee told Kittel.

“This is one of the worst towns I’ve ever been in,” said another. “In some ways it’s worse than way down South.”

“Down there the colored folks have got their own police and their own letter carriers,” said a third. “This is the first town I ever seen that didn’t have colored polices.”

“In this school up here they teach my children to sing My Country ’Tis of Thee, then up there in the University what do they do? They won’t give me anything there but a mop, if I’m lucky enough. I served in the War. In Paris, they didn’t treat you the way they do here.”

“You know why we can’t make a livin’; it’s because you white folks got everything and won’t give us a chance.”

“They think of us as something ... not quite animals, but still not people.”

“They just look at the bad in the colored—the ones who carry on up at Sharp End—and don’t see the rest.”

“Oh, yeah, on election day they come after us in cabs to take us to vote. That’s the one time they come after us. But it don’t mean nothin’. They want our votes all righty, but that’s all.”

“That sewer down there’s a disgrace.... They been makin’ promises for years, but they won’t never do nothin’ about it, I reckon.

 “Negroes will never get justice from the whites.”

“I think some day a big storm will come and just wipe out all their big fine houses up there and not touch our poor little houses at all.”