Category Archives: Virginia

Births Deaths Marriages, Enslaved People, Maternal Kin, Newspaper Articles, Politics, Virginia

Misinformation Monday, no. 8.

The eighth in a series of posts revealing the fallability of records (or, in this case, secondary sources.)

My great-aunt Julia Allen Maclin told me that her grandfather Jasper Holmes‘ brother, Joseph R. Holmes, a politician, was shot and killed at Charlotte Court House, Virginia. Before I found contemporaneous newspaper articles detailing the murder, I had only a couple of brief mentions in scholarly works to establish his death date. The accounts varied so widely as to be completely irreconcilable.

First, in Luther P. Jackson’s Negro Office-Holders in Virginia 1865-1895, published in 1945:

Joseph R. Holmes, Constitutional Convention, 1867-68, Charlotte and Halifax. SHOEMAKER. Born a slave in Charlotte County. Was hired out by his master to engage in shoemaking by traveling from plantation to plantation. Joseph R. Holmes’ brother Watt was likewise a shoemaker. Joseph learned to read and write and was very intelligent. After the war he received some training in law from his former master. About 1870 he met a tragic death by a gun shot on the grounds of the Charlotte County court house. According to one report his former owner shot him because of an offensive political speech; according to another report he was killed by mistake. During the period of his activity in politics, Holmes bought a farm home consisting of 8 1/2 acres.

Then, in Virginius Dabney’s Virginia: The New Dominion, published in 1971:

… In 1892, Joseph R. Holmes of Charlotte County, a black who had served in the Underwood convention more than two decades before, decided to run for the legislature. He was shot dead by a white man in the audience he was addressing.

Dabney’s account is so far off the mark as to boggle the mind. By 1892, Joseph Holmes had been dead more than 20 years. He never ran for any legislative seat and, while his murderer was certainly a white man, he was not giving a stump speech when he was shot.

Jackson’s version is much closer to the truth, though some the details of Holmes’ life cannot be confirmed and neither of the motives for his assassination are correct.

Here are newspaper accounts of the murder, which themselves vary a bit on the facts. However, based on comparisons with other sources, to be detailed soon, the New York Times‘ 8 May 1869 version of events (reprinted from the Richmond Dispatch, set forth below, seems closest to the truth:

The Recent Homicide at Charlotte Court-House, Virginia

From the Richmond Dispatch, May 5. From persons who were present at Charlotte Court-House on Monday we gather the following particulars of a most lamentable homicide which occurred there on that day, resulting in the death of JOE HOLMES, a colored man, well known to our readers as a member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention. Early in the morning, Mr. JOHN MARSHALL JR. met a colored man named MINNIL, who was formerly a slave of Captain GILLIAM, and asked him if he was the man who attempted his life some time ago. The negro, without making any reply to the question, immediately raised his bludgeon as if to strike MARSHALL, who drew his pistol. The negro then took to his heels, and was pursued by MARSHALL and some of his friends, and it was rumored during the day that he had been killed by them. Such, however, was not the fact, for he was alive and well and his work yesterday. About 2:30 o’clock on Monday, while the rumor was rife, the question of arresting MARSHALL was agitated, and HOLMES made himself very officious in regard to it. MARSHALL spoke to him about it, and he made some insulting reply, when Mr. BOYD, a friend of young MARSHALL, struck him with a stick. HOLMES then drew, or attempted to draw, his pistol, when he was fired at by some unknown party. HOLMES immediately retreated, and, when near the Court-house door, turned and fired at the young man, when several shots were fired at him, only one, however, taking effect. HOLMES had strength enough left to walk to the Court-house, and fell dead. The deceased was a prominent member of the late Constitutional Convention, prominent rather from the merriment he created on rising to speak rather than from any participation in the serious work of the body. He was good-natured, polite, and a great favourite with the reporters, to whom he was specially courteous, and whose daily appearance he always greeted with a broad laugh. The nearest we ever knew of him to come to a quarrel was a laughable row with Dr. BAYNE over the disputed ownership of a law book. JOE’s death will be regretted by all who knew him in the Convention, and by those who have laughed over him in the Humors of Reconstructions, where he figured as the “great fire-eater.”

To celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 2013, Virginia’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Commission created a roll call of the African-American men who were elected to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868 and to the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate during Reconstruction. Unfortunately, it picked up Virginius Dabney’s wildly inaccurate date:

Joseph R. Holmes, a native of Virginia, was a shoemaker and farmer who represented Charlotte and Halifax Counties at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867-1868. He ran for a seat in the Senate of Virginia, but was killed in 1892.

 

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Maternal Kin, North Carolina, Paternal Kin, Photographs, Virginia

Happy Mother’s Day!

Thinking of my mother and remembering my grandmothers with love and gratitude this day.

Mama

My mother and me.

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My father’s mother and his sister, circa 1942.

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My mother’s mother and her brothers, circa 1938. 

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Sidenote: I first saw the last photo in a magazine article about Aberdeen Homes, a late New Deal housing project in Hampton, Virginia. My grandfather worked as a construction supervisor at the site and moved his young family into one of the first apartments. I finally tracked this photo down in the photo archives of the Virginia State Library.

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Maternal Kin, Photographs, Virginia

Order of Moses.

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Moses Hall, Charlotte Court House, Virginia.

The Grand United Order of Moses, Inc., was a small fraternal insurance society for black men and women based in rural south-central Virginia. The founder and lifelong leader of the Order of Moses was James Murray Jeffress (1873–1951), who organized the society in 1904 at his birthplace, the village of Charlotte Court House. Jeffress graduated from Hampton Institute in 1894 and Howard University divinity school in 1901. He was ordained a Baptist minister and served as principal of a public school in Charlotte County.

By 1900, white Virginians had disenfranchised blacks and had segregated schooling and public transportation. Jeffress, sometimes called “the Booker Washington of Charlotte County,” was an accommodationist who tried to make life tolerable for his fellow blacks without challenging white racists directly. Fraternal societies such as the Order of Moses offered a modicum of economic security through medical and funeral insurance. They also supplemented the churches as black organizations that whites were willing to tolerate. They were organizations in which African Americans could vote, hold office, and brighten their drab lives with the color and spectacle of regalia and ritual, impressive titles and fancy-dress parades, lodge meetings and funerals.

Even more than in other fraternal societies, a charismatic oligarch dominated the Order of Moses: Murray Jeffress. He depicted the origins of his society in quasiprophetic language. “It was in 1901 that I began having visions repeatedly. These visions consisted of a single blackboard in which was chalked the words: The Grand United Order of Moses. After the third vision, I decided that I would do something about it.” In 1904, the Order of Moses recruited 203 members, and the society received a state charter. A few years later, it acquired Moses Hall as its headquarters. Jeffress took the title “right worshipful grand leader.”

A crisis in the society occurred when a black man, presumably instigated by whites, alleged that the Order of Moses had been organized to keep African Americans from working for white people. A prominent white man squelched this rumor by offering $ 150 for evidence in its support, evidence that never materialized. For his efforts, the Order of Moses made him an honorary member.

Jeffress resented the injustice of segregation and disenfranchisement, but he considered small economic advances the only realistic goals. “Let us teach every boy and girl to build and not tear down. Teach them that being God-fearing, property-owning and debt -paying citizens is greater than being a voter or being on social equality with [a] king.” He encouraged his followers to buy farmland or learn a vocational trade.

Although Jeffress opposed urban migration, many rural black Virginians moved to northern cities. As a result, Order of Moses lodges appeared outside Virginia, mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Northern lodges unsuccessfully asked for the headquarters to be moved to Philadelphia, which they regarded as more convenient than Charlotte Court House, which at the time of Jeffress’s death had only 250 residents and neither a railroad station nor a bus stop.

The strength and the weakness of the Order of Moses was its identification with Charlotte Court House and Charlotte County. The order helped establish a high school there for black youth, provided bus transportation for the students, constructed and equipped a hospital building, and provided electrical service for the village. The order owned an auditorium that could accommodate four hundred people, an office building, and apartments for black schoolteachers. The society also owned three hundred acres of farmland worked by black sharecroppers.

As leader of the Order of Moses, Murray Jeffress became a respected figure in African American life. He was elected first vice president of the Negro Organization Society and president of the Federation of Negro Fraternal Organizations. He served a number of Baptist churches as pastor.

At the time of Jeffress’s death in 1951, the Order of Moses claimed a little more than five thousand members. Apparently, his son Wilson became the society’s new leader. How long it continued to operate is unknown. In any event, the little Order of Moses had survived into the post—World War II era, an achievement that few better-known African American fraternal societies equaled.

— Adapted slightly from Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations, Nina Mjagkij, ed.

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My grandfather’s older brother, Jasper Maxwell Allen (1904-1959), married J. Murray Jeffress’ daughter Lena P. Jeffress, settled in Charlotte Court House, and opened a dental office in Moses Hall.

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Photographs by Lisa Y. Henderson, July 2012.

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Maternal Kin, Other Documents, Virginia, Vocation

Man of a thousand hustles.

My great-grandfather, the longshoreman, rose from the docks to become a union officer and civic leader in Newport News, Virginia. The arc of that narrative seemed long and interesting enough, but we now know that it does not quite do this hard-working man justice. In fact, in just the first decade-and-a-half of the twentieth century, John C. Allen worked a half-dozen jobs to keep his growing family comfortably fed, clothed and sheltered. The 1900 census records John’s occupation as shipyard laborer, which is more or less consistent with received wisdom. Newport News city directories, however, capture the full range of John’s hustles over the years:

1902 — Allen Jno, eating house, Ivy Ave nr 18th. John’s church, Zion Baptist, was at 20th and Ivy, at the heart of Newport News’ East End. Presumably, John owned this small and apparently short-lived restaurant and probably lived on premises. (Fifteen years later, John’s nephew Junius Allen lived at 1752 Ivy, which is at the corner of 18th Street.)

1903 — Allen Jno C, lab h 748 21st   John was probably laboring at the shipyard. 748 21st Street is the house in which my grandfather and his siblings spent their early childhood years. I need to check deeds to find out if John Sr. bought it 1902-03. My grandparents also lived here during the first five or so years of their marriage.

1910 — Allen Jno C, painter h 748 21st  John is described as a shipyard painter in the 1910 census, and he seems to have worked this job at least two years.

1911 — Allen Jno C, painter h 748 21st  

1912 — Allen Jno C, agt Am Ben Ins Co h 748 21st  Insurance agent??? John had come an impressively long way for a man who’d been illiterate when he arrived in Newport News a dozen years earlier. American Beneficial Insurance Company was a black-owned business founded in 1902 in Richmond, Virginia, by Rev. Wesley F. Graham, a Baptist minister.

1913-14 — Allen Jno C, grocer 2206 Madison av h 2107 Marshall av  Around 1913, John bought the house on Marshall Avenue in which he and his wife lived out their years, at which my parents married, and in which his daughter Julia lived and operated a beauty parlor when I was a child. The Madison Avenue grocery is a complete mystery. [Postscript, 13 April 2014: A mystery only to me, apparently. You just have to ask the right questions. After my mother read this post, she sent me a text identifying “Mama Taylor” and her husband as folks who operated a grocery that may have been her grandfather’s. Post-postscript, 19 April 2014: my Uncle C. told me that (1) Mama Taylor and her husband Johnnie lived above a grocery they operated in the 1900 block of Madison Avenue; (2) Mama Taylor was close to “her Johnnie,” my grandfather; (3) Mama Taylor was about his grandparents’ age; (4) he wondered if Mr. Taylor and John C. Allen Sr. were related, as they had similar builds and full heads of white hair; (5) at least during my uncle’s childhood, John and Agnes Allen ordered their groceries from a white-owned business in the 2100 block of Madison, not from the Taylors.]

1914-15 — Allen Jno C, clk h 2107 Marshall av  Clerk? What kind of clerk?

The 1916 and 1917 city directories revert to the 1913-14 grocer entry, but when John Allen registered for the World War I draft in 1918, he reported that he worked as a laborer for Hampton Roads Stevedoring Company. The 1918 and 1919 city directories also show him as a laborer. (Had the grocery store closed? Why? Was there better money on the docks?)

UPDATE: On 31 May 1917, J.C. Allen ran a small ad in the Newport News Daily Press announcing the liquidation via auction of his grocery store at 2206 Madison Avenue:

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The 1920 census finally recorded John’s occupation as “longshoreman on piers.” (John was 45 years old in 1920, well into middle age. Unloading ships in this era was brutal work even for young men.) Subsequent city directories label him “longshoreman” (1923), “mgr International Longshoreman’s Union” (1925), “mgr Intl Longshoreman’s Locals 844 & 946 gro” (back in the grocery business, 1927).

In the 1930 census, John worked as a longshoreman for a steamship company, but is reported as a laborer in the 1931 and 1932 directories. In 1933, he’s again a manager with the union, but the 1940 censustaker described him as a longshoreman in “frt. transport.” (Incidentally, sometime in the late 1930s, he helped found Whittaker Memorial Hospital and joined its and Crown Savings Bank’s boards of directors.)

A 1953 obituary laconically notes that John C. Allen “worked for the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. for about 10 years and then became a stevedore.” Ah, but he did so much more.

John Allen ca1950

John C. Allen at his son-in-law’s in yet another role — farmer. Near Jetersville, Virginia, 1940s.

 

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Foodways, Maternal Kin, North Carolina, Oral History, Virginia

I never ate a bite in my life.

My grandmother, Margaret Colvert Allen: Papa was a hunter.

Me: He hunted?

My aunt: Papa was?

Grandma: Yeah. He hunted.

Me: So, he had hunting dogs.

Grandma: Yes, indeed. He had a place made to put his dogs in and — hound dogs, you know. Hunting dogs.

Me: Did — he hunted deer or smaller things?

Grandma: Naw. He never hunted deer. But he hunted rabbits and squirrels and quail. [Inaudible] and he would catch ‘em [inaudible] but I didn’t ever cook one. [Laughs.] His mother used to cook possum.

Me: Used to cook possum?

Grandma: Oh, possum, honey. They would cook those dern things.

Me: Well, possum stew. I guess I have heard of that.

Grandma: Hmm?

Me: Possum stew. I guess I have heard people talk about that.

Grandma: Naw. They didn’t have no possum stew. They’d bake this thing.

Me: Awwww!

Grandma: And, look, wait a minute. You know they’ve got big mouths. Long mouths. A possum. And he’d put a sweet potato in the possum’s mouth. [I laugh, hard.] I don’t remember cooking one, but my grandmother sure used to cook ’em. And Papa cooked ’em. But I refused to cook ’em. Not me. And you know these people when I came here ate muskrats?

Me: [Laughing.] In Newport News?

Grandma: John’s people ate muskrats. And you know the merchants would have ‘em hung up all on the outside the street, you know, like you used to have chicken cages where you could go and pick ….? Well, they would have these muskrats killed, and they were real bloody, and they would be hanging, and they’d just be killed. I mean, it wasn’t nothing wrong with ‘em if you liked that kind of thing. I cooked it for your daddy, but I declare before God I have never eaten a bite. [I laugh.] Not a bite.

My aunt: When I went to Africa, and we would take our day trips, they would have some kind of animal that they had split open –

Me: Butterflied. [Laughing.]

My aunt: And a rodent. Some kind of rodent. And I ain’t eating that. They had some kind of little rodent. And they had, like, barbecued it or something. And his head was still on.

Grandma: What you mean – little or big?

My aunt: Ma’am?

Grandma: How big would it be? ‘Bout the size of a squirrel or something like that?

My aunt: I don’t think it was a squirrel.

Grandma: Aw. Well, I don’t know what they were then. But, honey, these merchants on Jefferson Avenue used to have those muskrats hanging out there, honey, and you talking ‘bout bloody, and they would have skinned them, you know. And they were hanging like that. Ah. And bloodied. Ooooo. They would be so bloody. I fixed one and cooked it, but seriously, my hand to God, I never ate a bite in my life. I never intended to eat a bite. And my daddy didn’t like ‘em either. So my grandmother used to always bring him something down, she’d come down sometimes Sunday afternoon or Saturday night.

My aunt: Grandma Allen?

Grandma: No, no, no, no, no. My daddy.

Me: Harriet.

Grandma: She would always bring him something. Always bring him something. And this day she was supposed to have brought him some rabbit. Fried rabbit, you know. And I never shall forget. He sat over there by the window. Now, he’d had his dinner. He’d had Mama’s dinner, but when Grandma came and brought something he had to have some of that. He sat over there, and he ate, ate that piece of what he thought was rabbit, and he got down to the bone, and he knew it wasn’t rabbit. Because he didn’t – and he said, “Mama, what is this?” And she was crying laughing at him eating muskrat when he swore he’d never eat a bite. And she, I can see her right now. She was sitting over there, and, child, she was laughing. Laughing ‘til she cried. And Papa said, “You better be glad you’re my mama, ‘cause I certainly would whip you today if you weren’t my mama.” He was so mad.

Muskrat_eating_plant

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Interview of Margaret C. Allen by Lisa Y. Henderson; all rights reserved. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

 

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Births Deaths Marriages, Maternal Kin, North Carolina, Oral History, Photographs, Virginia

Remembering Margaret Colvert Allen.

She gripped a balled handkerchief, or a tissue, in that hand almost always. You’d only notice that little finger, crooked up above the rest, when she made certain gestures, like smoothing her dress across her lap. It was a source of endless fascination when I was a child, and she would obliging turn her hand this way and that so we could get a closer look. Her pinkie finger, it was, curled permanently into a C-shape.

Here’s how it happened:

My grandmother:  Ooo, I had a lot of friends.  We had a lot of friends.  We could not visit people all in the neighborhood.  We could not go, the children came to our house.  You know, to play and all that kind of – to play ball.  We’d play ball in the evening, and they’d put me in the field because I couldn’t catch no ball on account of my finger.  [Laughs.]  I always had to go in the field.  Louise and Launie Mae were whizzes.  Louise was a terrible bad ball —  I mean, she could play some ball.  But Launie Mae was good, too.  But, honey, they’d put me out there way out there in the field where didn’t no – just as soon as I’d reach up to catch that ball that thing would knock it out.

Me:  Right. How did you hurt your finger?

My grandmother:  Ah, you know, they had windows that you’d put a stick under.

Me:  To prop them up?

My mother’s cousin: Didn’t have a sash.

My grandmother:  Yeah.  And I was in there playing and took that stick out there, and it broke something.  But anyway, Mama said she had gone to town.  That’s what they say when they went into Statesville.  And she said when she came back, Golar came out meeting her with me in her arms, and said she had on a little dress, and said she turned the dress up and blood was coming through the dress off me, you know, my finger and everything.  It scared her to death.  So they carried, she carried me to the doctor’s, and they put splints on to get it – it was broken, you know.  He put splints on.  But, see, I would pick ‘em off.

Me:  Just take it right off.

My grandmother:  Take ‘em off.  And take ‘em off.  And hold my hand like that.  [Balling her hand into a fist.]

Me:  Okay.  So that’s how it healed.  It healed closed.  How old were you then?  Real little?

My grandmother:  I guess I was little.  I don’t know how old I was.  Two, three.  I don’t know whether Launie Mae was there or not.  I know Louise was, but I don’t know ‘bout all of ‘em.  But, anyway, I was just big enough to crawl up to the window and pull the stick out.

I have many favored photos of my grandmother, and this is one of the last:

MCA

At home, in her easy chair, just back from church, with that little finger.

Remembering Margaret Colvert Allen (2 August 1908-11 February 2010).

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Maternal Kin, Newspaper Articles, Photographs, Virginia

John C. Allen and Whittaker Memorial.

Sixty years today, the same day it ran his obituary, the Norfolk Journal and Guide published a photograph of my great-grandfather John C. Allen Sr., chairman of the Board of Trustees, accepting a charitable donation on behalf of  Whittaker Memorial Hospital.

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A few years earlier, the Journal of the National Medical Association printed this history of the hospital:

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Births Deaths Marriages, Maternal Kin, Newspaper Articles, Virginia

Remembering John C. Allen Sr. on the 60th anniversary of his death.

They sat rather stiffly side by side, each with hands clasped in lap. The occasion was their 50th anniversary, and granddaughter Marion captured the moment in the only photograph I have seen of them together.

50th Anniversary

Three years later, family gathered again on the day after Christmas to pay respects to John and Mary Agnes Holmes Allen.  Papa Allen retired to bed after dinner and never woke again.

ALLEN -- JC Allen Obit Cropped

Norfolk Journal and Guide, 2 January 1954.

He was buried in Pleasant Shade cemetery in Hampton, Virginia, near the graves of his son John Jr. and daughter Marion. IMG_1275

Top photo taken by Marion Allen Christian, 1953, copy in possession of Lisa Y. Henderson; bottom photo taken by Lisa Y. Henderson, February 2011.

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