The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (4 page)

NEGRO PEEPER
⁶

Is discovered on the gallery of a
citizen residing on Espejo Street

Mr. Charles Helmer, while on his way home Tuesday night last with his wife and a party of ladies saw a negro on the gallery of Mr. George McCary, on Espejo Street, near Government. The Negro was on the gallery peeping through the blinds and when one of the ladies discovered him, he jumped to the ground. Mr. Helmer chased the man across a pasture but was unable to capture him.

The black response derived from the old paternalistic relationships with whites. The famous educator Booker T. Washington appealed to the white city elders across the South to confront the “criminal colored elements” but not to “punish the entire Negro race” with segregation ordinances. Washington’s disciples began echoing a similar theme in Mobile. Washington was already a national figure, and his presence in Mobile increased the influence of two black businessmen, Charles Allen and A. N. Johnson. Washington would vacation with Allen, often fishing at his home. Johnson owned a funeral home prominent in the black community and published his own newspaper, where he often broke with Washington’s doctrines of appeasement with whites. Washington appealed to whites to recall the positive relationships between the two races, a relationship that in large part favored whites. Johnson seemed to have a clearer notion of white intentions. Through his writing, he sought to challenge the existing structure. He understood that a single increase in restrictions would only lead to more.

Johnson was right in his belief that a movement to undo current relationships between the races was afoot. Erwin Craighhead, the editor of the ostensibly moderate
Register
, endorsed in an editorial the necessity of segregation on streetcars. These sensational headlines and editorials only heightened racial tensions in the city, and any idea that Mobile would be different from the rest of the South crumbled. The newspapers increased their character assault on Mobile’s blacks, including a decision by the newspaper editors to publish on the front page reports of crimes committed by blacks hundreds of miles away.

BOUND FACE TO FACE
⁷

They had murdered a young farmer
while on his way home
One of the negroes escaped into Arkansas

N
EWBORN
, T
ENN
., O
CTOBER
8—Garfield Burley, and Curtis Brown, negroes, were lynched here at 9 o’clock tonight by a mob of 500 persons…. The mob would not listen to the judge and forcibly took possession of the two men…. Ropes were presented and the two men were taken to a telephone pole where they were securely tied face to face. At a given word, they were strung up and in a few minutes both were pronounced dead. The lynching programme was carried out in an orderly manner, not a shot being fired.

BAD NEGRO

Sam Harris Riddled with Bullets at Salem Ala
.

USED AXE ON WOMEN
⁸

The negro was placed in custody and held until Miss Meadows had sufficiently recovered to identify him. This she did at 4 o’clock this afternoon, and the negro was taken in charge by about 125 armed men and his body riddled with bullets on the spot. He denied his guilt until the first shot was fired, when he acknowledged the crime.

By October 16, 1902, Mobile reacted with a sweeping ordinance that had been adopted in New Orleans, as well as in Montgomery and Memphis.

TEN MORE POLICEMEN PROVIDED
⁹
FOR CITY: SEPARATION OF THE
RACES ON STREET CARS

Petitions, circulated by the Item and
Signed by More Than 500 People
,
Read and Favorably Acted Upon—
full text for the Ordinance Requiring
the Separation of the Races on
All of the Street Cars
.

Be it ordained by the mayor and general counsel of the city of Mobile as follows: That all street railcars operated in the city of Mobile and its police jurisdiction shall provide seats for the white people and negroes, when there are white people and negroes on the same car, by requiring the conductor or any other employee in charge of said car or cars to assign passengers to seats on the cars, or when the car is divided in two compartments in such manner as to separate the white people from the negroes by seating the white people in the front seats and the negroes in the rear seats as they enter said cars; but in the event such order of seating might cause inconvenience to those who are already properly seated, the conductor … may use his discretion in seating passengers, but in such manner that no white person and negro must be placed or seated in the same section or compartment arranged for two persons; provided that negro nurses having in charge white children or sick or infirm white persons may be assigned seats among the white people.

Be it further ordained, that all conductors and other employees while in charge of cars are hereby invoked with the police power of a police officer of the city of Mobile, to carry out rail provisions, and any person failing or refusing to take a seat among those assigned to the race to which he or she belongs, if there is any such seat vacant, at the behest of a conductor … shall, upon conviction, be fined a sum not less than five dollars and not more than fifty dollars.

And so it was done. Jim Crow laws were now established in Mobile, if not as violently enforced as in other southern cities, although equally rigid. Two weeks later, on November 1, the black leaders A. F. Owens, A. N. Johnson, and A. N. McEwen staged a boycott, which lasted barely two months. During the time of the boycott, some white business owners, unconvinced the city would benefit from the segregation ordinance, openly defied it. James Wilson, the owner of the Mobile Light and Railroad Company, told his conductors not to enforce the law. Whites sat anywhere they chose on Wilson’s cars, and blacks were, for a time, seen seated in the front. The courts intervened and the segregation laws were not only upheld but strengthened. On streetcars, conductors could use their own discretion in upholding the ordinances. After December 1902, whites faced jail time and a fifty-dollar fine for not upholding segregation statutes.

Streetcars were the first step. Total segregation came next, followed by the vigilante violence Mobile thought it had avoided. The outspoken black leaders, who once believed they had a voice, fled the city. A. N. Johnson escaped to Nashville in 1907.

“With the disintegration of the boycott
¹⁰
and the court’s decision, segregated public conveyances legally became an established element of life in Mobile—a condition that persisted unchanged until the 1950s,” historian and Mobile native David Alsobrook wrote in his comprehensive 1983 dissertation. “By 1904, Mobile’s blacks, as in other southern cities, were separated from whites by municipal and state laws and by customs. Mobile had segregated public conveyances, schools, parks, restaurants, hotels, theaters, hospitals, cemeteries, saloons and brothels. With the single exception of public transportation, segregation was maintained without the passage of municipal ordinances.”

By the time Herbert and Stella arrived, whites and blacks alike now lived under a new, terrifying system, naturally worse for blacks but also not easy for whites who didn’t believe in segregation. David Alsobrook recalled walking down the street in Mobile one day as a boy and seeing the charred remains of a cross. In addition to the legal segregation codes was the daily etiquette whites demanded, unwritten codes that, if not followed, could be deadly. Herbert knew them all by heart:

1. No offering handshakes with whites, for it assumed equality.
   

2. No looking at or speaking to white women.
   

3. No offering to light a white woman’s cigarette.
   

4. All whites were to be addressed as “sir,” “mister” or “ma’am,” but whites were free to address blacks by their first names or “boy.”
   

This was Herbert Aaron’s America. He knew where he stood.

C
HILDREN WERE BORN
frequently to the Aarons. The combination of children and Herbert’s constant (and not always successful) search for work forced the family to look for housing as often as Stella bore children. A son, Herbert junior, was born in 1930, and the family moved again, this time to 10 O’Guinn. Then the family moved to 1112 Elmira, before renting another apartment in Down the Bay, at 666 Wilkinson, for nine dollars per month.

Four years later, on February 5, 1934, at 8:25 p.m., Stella gave birth again, this time to a twelve-and-a-quarter-pound boy named Henry Louis. The baby was so large that Stella nicknamed him “the Man.”

A year before Henry was born, Herbert took a job as a part-time riveter at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company, on Pinto Island, on the Mobile River. The company had been in business since World War I. Herbert worked as a boilermaker assistant and riveter on coal barges, minesweepers for the U.S. Navy, and tank barges for oil companies. The work was hard and often irregular, but a few years later, as the war in Europe escalated and tensions with Japan increased, a job at ADDSCO became one of the plum ones to have in Mobile, especially for blacks. At the company’s peak, a third of ADDSCO’s workers were black, though that did not mean the workforce was treated with complete equity. The riveting and manufacturing and labor crews were largely segregated. Blacks and whites entered together through the large main gate, but both proceeded through designated separate entrances. When he first accepted the job, Herbert was paid sixteen cents an hour.

With the family now numbering five, the apartment on 666 Wilkinson was no longer sufficient. In 1936, Gloria Aaron was born. Two more children followed, Alfred, who did not survive pneumonia, and Tommie, in 1939. At this point, Herbert began forming a bold vision for a semiemployed black person: owning his own house. In Down the Bay, both Elmira and O’Guinn streets were fairly integrated, but, according to census data, only the whites on the streets where Herbert lived owned their homes.

For Herbert, ownership meant protecting his family from outside forces that could, at any time, take away what he had. Herbert had lived in Mobile for thirteen years and had already moved four times. “When you own something,”
¹¹
Herbert would tell his children, “nobody can take it away from you.” Herbert chose Toulminville, once an all-white enclave within the city limits, roughly seven miles northwest from Down the Bay. To black Mobilians, Toulminville was considered a step down from Down the Bay socially, and Henry would later recall that when he was a child, Toulminville kids absorbed insults from the blacks who lived closer to the city.

Local blacks called Toulminville “Struggleville,” because people who had moved out to Toulminville, or so went the local folklore, did so anticipating a rise in social status but routinely found it difficult to pay the rent. Unlike Down the Bay, Toulminville was considered lower-middle-class by black standards, as the city housed numerous teachers within its borders. Herbert purchased two adjacent lots for fifty-three dollars apiece on Edwards Street and began culling wood. Herbert collected ship timber from Pinto Island. Young Henry, all of six years old, collected wood from abandoned buildings. Some of the wood came from houses that had partially burned down, and some of the original walls of the house still contained deeply discolored streaks, charred from fire. Herbert constructed a six-to-twelve-foot triangular gabled roof above the front door. He used the smaller, miscellaneous pieces of wood for the inside walls. The floor was made of yellow pine. Like most of the houses in the South, the structure itself stood on concrete blocks, both to cool the house and to protect the flooring from the damp southern soil.

In 1942, when the house was completed, Herbert moved the family into 2010 Edwards Street, a narrow dirt road on the southwest side of Toulminville. Edwards Street bordered a wide playground and baseball field, Carver Park, to the west. By this time, Stella had given birth to six children. The house consisted of two rooms and a small kitchen area, the backyard big enough for a small garden, a livestock pen, and an outhouse. For lighting, Stella kept a kerosene lamp nearby. There were no windows, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, but the house did not belong to the bank, or a landlord, white or black. Herbert had built a piece of the world for himself, and it would become the cornerstone of the family for the next four generations.

“The only people who owned their houses,” Henry would often say, “were rich people, and the Aarons.”

Ownership was not a concept easily entertained by blacks in the South, but Herbert Aaron keenly understood its value. As much as southern whites would become stereotyped in their collective racial attitudes, so, too, did blacks in the Deep South suffer from the opposite labels of docility, too easily accepting of the withering effects of Jim Crow.

As an adult, regardless of his actual position, Henry Aaron would always be perceived as too accommodating when it came to social conditions. The same was true with Herbert in Mobile. Such clichés were misleading at best. The truth was that Herbert Aaron developed a wide and serious strategy for dealing with the limitations placed on him by society; the first was ownership. He was sophisticated in his knowledge of the social code of Mobile, and fortified by a core toughness that was easily underestimated. Herbert fought for his space, but he used nontraditional weapons.