The Invisible Line (64 page)

18
Ayers,
Promise of New South,
p. 119; Eller,
Miners, Millhands
, pp. 128-29, 140.

19
Turner and Traum,
John Mayo
, pp. 16, 20; Hower, “Uncertain and Treacherous,” pp. 318- 19; Johnson County Deed Book 55, p. 350, Johnson County Courthouse, Paintsville, Ky.

20
Charles E. Martin,
Hollybush: Folk Building and Social Change in an Appalachian Community
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), a study of a community two counties south of Johnson County, cited in Ayers,
Promise of New South
, p. 118.

21
Ratliff interview; Eller,
Miners, Millhands
, pp. 176-78; Ayers,
Promise of New South
, pp. 121-22; Sheafer, “Hygiene of Coal-Mines,” pp. 233-34; E. N. Clopper, “Child Labor in Coal Mines, West Virginia,”
Railroad Trainman
27 (1910), pp. 103, 106; and Keith Dix,
Work Relations in the Coal Industry: The Hand-Loading Era
,
1880-1930
(Morgantown: West Virginia University, Institute for Labor Studies, 1977), pp. 4-12.

22
Eller,
Miners, Millhands
, pp. 176-78; Ayers,
Promise of New South
, pp. 121-22; and Dix,
Work Relations,
pp. 8-12.

23
Eller,
Miners, Millhands
, p. 178; see also Mike Yarrow, “Capitalism, Patriarchy and ‘Mens Work': The System of Control of Production in Coal Mining,” in
The Impact of Institutions in Appalachia
, ed. Jim Lloyd and Anne G. Campbell (Boone, Ky.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1986), pp. 29, 31-32; Jean Thomas,
Big Sandy
(New York: Henry Holt, 1940), p. 135; Sheafer, “Hygiene of Coal-Mines,” p. 232.

24
Eller,
Miners, Millhands
, pp. 161-62; George Korson,
Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943), p. 31.

25
Van Lear, the mining community at Miller's Creek, was named after Consolidation Coal executive Van Lear Black; see Danny K. Blevins,
Van Lear
(Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2008), p. 19. See also Eller,
Miners, Millhands
, p. 70. Rand Dotson, in
Roanoke, Virginia, 1882- 1912: Magic City of the New South
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), p. 4, notes that the town of Big Lick was near the Roanoke River in Roanoke County, making the name change an obvious one.

26
Eller, in
Miners, Millhands
, pp. 171, 182-98, describes mine personnel policies that created a “judicious mixture” of locals and outsiders, blacks and native whites and foreigners. See also Ronald L. Lewis,
Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 134.

27
Eller,
Miners, Millhands
, pp. 169-72; Lewis,
Black Coal Miners,
pp. 128, 143, 148; and Blevins,
Van Lear
, p. 87.

28
Spencer v. Looney
(Va. 1912), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, trial transcript, pp. 59ff; 1900 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va. On the necessity of horseback travel in the mountains, see Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,”
Geographical Journal
17 (1901), pp. 588, 590-91.

29
See Turner and Traum,
John Mayo,
p. 17; and Semple, “Anglo-Saxons,” pp. 590-91. Jasper Spencer lived in Floyd County, just below Johnson County: 1900 U.S. Census, Floyd County, Ky.

30
See Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee,
The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 198-99. A Johnson County survey conducted in 1941 found that “small farms and poor land” were cited as frequent reasons for out-migration. Robin M. Williams and Howard W. Beers, “Attitudes Towards Rural Migration and Family Life in Johnson and Robertson Counties, 1941,”
Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin
452 (June 1943), pp. 35-36. Nevertheless, researchers in the 1940s also found that low mobility rates correlated with high fertility in Johnson County, because of “traditions of fixed residence and of strong family life.” Irving A. Spaulding and Howard W. Beers, “Mobility and Fertility Rates of Rural Families in Robertson and Johnson Counties, Kentucky, 1918-1941,”
Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin
451 (June 1943), p. 19.

31
W. G. Schwab,
The Forests of Buchanan County
(Charlottesville, Va., 1918), p. 9; and Alan J. Banks, “Land and Capital in Eastern Kentucky, 1890-1915,”
Appalachian Journal
8 (1980), pp. 8-18, cited in Altina L. Waller,
Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 152.

32
The wave of Hatfield-McCoy violence in the late 1880s came after years of peace between the families and had, in fact, been sparked by the insistence of local merchants and politicians on bringing Hatfields to justice for earlier crimes. Waller,
Feud,
pp. 195, 200-201, 233.

33
John Fox Jr., “To the Breaks of the Sandy,”
Scribner's Magazine
28 (1900), pp. 340-41.

1
On the rural character of Brookland, see Merrill Lavine and Sarah Lightner, “Establishment of the Brookland Community, 1887-1920,” in
Images of Brookland: The History and Architecture of a Washington Suburb
, ed. George W. McDaniel (Washington, D.C.: George Washington University, 1979), pp. 9, 24-26.

2
Contemporaneous photographs of compositors at the Government Printing Office—the position Wall held for decades—show everyone wearing three-piece suits. See also Stephen R. Wall Personnel File, National Archives, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis; Lavine and Lightner, “Establishment of Brookland Community,” p. 27. Regarding the neighborhood's social status, one early resident said, “For a time we thought we were going to have a nabob neighborhood. We had about 8 families of social prominence. But they discovered their mistake about 1910 and moved elsewhere.” Ibid., p. 26.

3
See
Report on Site for Government Printing Office
, S. Rep. 51-2494 (1891), pp. 67, 98.

4
Daniel R. MacGilvray, “Age of Electricity,” in
A Short History of GPO
(1986), online at
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/history/macgilvray.html#5
.

5
Ibid.

6
“City Bulletins: Printers Must Be Neat,”
Washington Post
, April 23, 1909, p. 14.

7
Wall Personnel File; “Printers' Two Camps,”
Washington Post
, July 17, 1905, p. 2; Public Printer Donnelly in
Richmond Reformer
, November 11, 1911, quoted in MacGilvray, “Age of Electricity”; see also Booker T. Washington, “The Negro and the Labor Unions” (June 1913), in
The Booker T. Washington Papers
, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 12:208.

8
See Daniel J. Sharfstein, “The Secret History of Race in the United States,”
Yale Law Journal
112 (2003), pp. 1473, 1486, and nn62-68.

9
Fragment of a letter to the
Washington Post
, n.d., box 23-1, folder 8, Cooper Papers; “What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States,”
Independent
, January 24, 1907, p. 181. The anonymous author was Mary Church Terrell, who reprinted the piece in her 1940 autobiography,
A Colored Woman in a White World
(1940; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1980). See also “Color Line Drawn,”
Washington Post
, February 23, 1908, p. 6; “Heflin Shoots Two,”
Washington Post
, March 28, 1908, p. 1.

10
“Dig Deep at Printery,”
Washington Post
, February 9, 1908, p. 3. “Very Slow to Strike,”
Washington Post
, October 5, 1903, p. 5, describes complaints about black workers dating back to the 1860s. According to Terrell, in
Colored Woman
, “Colored women know all too well if they make themselves conspicuous or objectionable, either to their fellow clerks or to their superior officers, they are courting disaster and ruin. The few colored women who are assigned to rooms in which white women work are constantly in a state of suspense and apprehension, not knowing the day or the hour when the awful summons of removal or dismissal will come. They know they are there either by mistake or sufferance, and they would as soon think of ‘creating a disturbance' as they would plot to dynamite the White House. All they ask is to be let alone and be allowed to do their work in peace” (p. 253). See also Stephen R. Wall to Charles A. Stillings, June 27, 1906, Wall Personnel File. “Having married a little late in life, six years ago,” he wrote, “I feel keenly the responsibility of the future welfare of my family, and as my years for active service are limited, I am making every effort to finish paying for my home and then to the education of my children that they may be self supporting in early life, and not be unfortunate as I have been.”

11
Wall to Stillings, June 27, 1906; Stillings to Wall, June 28, 1906, Wall Personnel File.

12
“Remains of Mrs. Wall Laid to Rest,”
Washington Post
, November 17, 1902, p. 14; “Weather,”
Washington Post
, November 13, 1902, p. 1.

13
“Capt. O.S.B. Wall,”
Washington Post
, April 28, 1891, p. 7; “Funeral of Captain Wall,”
Washington Post
, April 30, 1891, p. 4; Everett O. Alldredge,
The Centennial History of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, Washington, D.C., 1865-1965
(Pikesville, Md.: Port City Press, 1965), pp. 23-24.

14
“Remains of Mrs. Wall Laid to Rest,”
Washington Post
, November 17, 1902, p. 14;
Wall v. Oyster
, No. 2203 (1910), record transcript, p. 23, Record Group 21, Records of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Writes Jenny Carson, “In 1955, after a protracted legal struggle, two porters were promoted to conducting jobs, becoming the first Black men in North America to be hired as sleeping car conductors.” See Carson, “Riding the Rails: Black Railroad Workers in Canada and the United States,”
Labour/Le Travail
50 (Fall 2002), online at
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/50/carson.html
. I thank Donald Fyson for suggesting this source, as well as the Lovell's Montreal directories, online at
http://bibnum2.bnquebec.ca/bna/lovell/
. See also 1900 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., New York, N.Y., Queens County, N.Y.; 1910 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., New York, N.Y., Queens County, N.Y.

15
Kelly Miller,
As to the Leopard's Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.
(Washington, D.C.: Howard University, 1905), p. 16; “Young Langston Wanted,”
Washington Post
, June 26, 1891, p. 1. Langston never ventured over the color line again, although people continued to cluck over another transgression: he became a Democrat. See “Negro Democrats,”
Washington Bee
, September 10, 1904, p. 4. See also Heidi Ardizzone,
An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Lawrence Otis Graham,
The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 182.

16
See, e.g., “Avers Taint in Blood: White Woman Says She Unknowingly Married Negro,”
Washington Post
, August 29, 1908, p. 14; “Court Declares Her White,”
Washington Post
, August 6, 1907, p. 5; “White, Said Courts,”
Washington Post
, July 25, 1907, p. 1; “Old Dominion Stirred,”
Washington Post
, February 25, 1907, p. 5; “Miscreants Wreck House: Race Issue Supposed Cause of Outrage in Frederick County: Victim's Son Reinstated in School After Allegation of Negro Blood Had Been Disproved by Physicians,”
Washington Post
, May 24, 1906, p. 12; “Woman Ejected from Hotel,”
Washington Post
, July 28, 1904, p. 9; “Taint of Negro Blood: Charge Against a Wife Leads to Suit for Damages,”
Washington Post
, March 10, 1900, p. 9; “Wife of Negro Blood,”
Washington Post
, July 7, 1899, p. 2; “Her Children Expelled: A Washington Woman Protests Against Charge of Having Negro Blood,”
Washington Post
, April 15, 1899, p. 1; and “Charged with Miscegenation: An Apparently White Woman Who Insists She Is of Negro Descent,”
Washington Post
, December 15, 1898, p. 3. Chase and Wall were both involved in Republican Party politics, albeit in opposing factions, in the 1880s. See, e.g., “Perry Carson's Victory,”
Washington Post
, January 11, 1888, p. 1. See also “The White Fever,”
Washington Bee
, June 6, 1908, p. 4; and advertisement,
Washington Bee
, July 17, 1909, p. 5. The phenomenon of passively passing for white is depicted simply and powerfully in Caroline Bond Day's short story “The Pink Hat,” which appeared in the December 1926 issue of
Opportunity
. See also Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,”
Transition
58 (2002), p. 4.

17
Caroline Langston's annual reception “signaled the opening of the social season among aristocrats of color in the nation's capital.” Willard B. Gatewood,
Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 336. See also John Mercer Langston,
From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol
(Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1894), pp. 522-23; Kelly Miller, unpublished autobiography, chap. 21, p. 2, box 71-1, folder 59, Miller Papers.