McEnery and Penn having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).
United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.
By now, you may be wondering, where is our hero?
Well, perhaps the most inconceivable thing about this story is neither the details of the horrific massacres nor the fact that—for the most part—Black people haven’t even succumbed to the primal seduction of vengeance. (Remember, the ones who were “waited upon” outnumbered the waiters.) There were more of us than them, yet we did not reciprocate the terror. Still, that is not the magnificent part.
The most marvelous, unbelievable thing about Black people in America is that they exist. Every imaginable monstrosity that evil can conjure has been inflicted on this population, yet they have not been extinguished.
The hero remains.
Still.
And that is the most wondrous part of all.
1874–1879
ATLANTA
Tera W. Hunter
In late 1879, Ernest Ingersoll, a Michigan-born naturalist and explorer, visited Atlanta. He was writing an article for Harper’s Magazine trumpeting the rise of the New South city since the Civil War.
Ingersoll was most impressed by the railroad industry, the ancillary businesses it stimulated, and the cushy lifestyles of the emergent industrial elites who profited from the city’s explosion. But he did not ignore the sights and sounds of the downtrodden elements, which struck contrasting poses alongside the prosperity.
“A feature of the city to which no well-ordered resident will be likely to direct a stranger’s attention is Shermantown,” he wrote. The place was so named because during the Civil War it had been occupied by U.S. general William T. Sherman, when he carried out his famous raid against the Confederates heading to the coast. Shermantown is a “random collection of huts forming a dense negro settlement in the heart of an otherwise attractive portion of the place,” Ingersoll noted. “The women ‘take in washing’ and the males as far as our observation taught us, devote their time to the lordly occupation of sunning themselves.”
An ink drawing of Shermantown accompanied the article, which complements Ingersoll’s commentary overly determined by his admittedly tutored “observations,” but it also offers readers additional information that insiders of Black urban life in the late 1870s might have seen differently. Ingersoll inferred disorder where one could have seen a consciously arranged village, poverty aside. Houses were drawn as dilapidated dwellings and looked fragile as though they were temporary shelter, built out of found wood and scraps of material.
Housing in the city was scarce as the population exploded after the Civil War and recovery from the war’s destruction was slow, which meant makeshift units were the norm for the influx of poor residents. The shacks, arranged in a semicircle, appear to have been built close enough together that little space passed between them. Some have rickety stairs leading up to doorways pitched off the ground, which allowed individuals to perch themselves and look out into the communal space in the center. Chickens and pigs wander about the yards, signs that rural people brought their survival skills with them to the city. The houses surround a well and a canopy that covers the implements of the washing trade, such as buckets and scrub boards. Women are shown walking with a basket of dirty laundry and doing the wash.
Men are shown, by contrast, hanging out but not engaged in work. Though Ingersoll noted Black men’s presence in other parts of the city, however insidious he found their occupations, as “brush fiends,” chair vendors, street musicians, and blackface minstrels, he leaned on the stereotypes of lazy Black men “sunning themselves” in Shermantown. Progress in the form of physical construction of the city in Ingersoll’s mind popped up like magic, without the human ingenuity of (Black and white) manual labor behind it. He did not connect the dots between Atlanta’s fast growth and economic development and the contributions of Black men as draymen, painters, brick masons, carpenters, brakemen, and factory workers.
Jim Crow had not yet settled in rigidly in 1879, which meant Blacks and whites lived in proximity in the still relatively new postwar city. But the signs of racial and economic inequalities were already being written into the physical landscape. Shermantown, just east of downtown, was the site of one of the largest Black settlements, though it otherwise mirrored the rest of the city’s demographics. Black residents were located in all the city’s wards. They dominated none of them but made up sizable clusters in several areas. They lived in low-lying areas where water and sewer systems were exclusively enjoyed by downtown businesses and wealthy white residents. Light sketches of houses perched on a hill at the top of the drawing depict the typical arrangement of good housing lording over poor stock in the bottoms.
Black clusters were subject not only to floods but also to sewage literally draining down from the hills. City laws allowed garbage to be dumped in Black and poor neighborhoods, in addition to the natural flow of malodorous human waste of the better-offs. Potable water for drinking and bathing could only be siphoned from wells. Ingersoll seemed not to notice these health hazards of uneven development, claiming that “drainage is therefore excellent” and “epidemics are unheard of and the locality is an island of health in the treacherous yellow-fever climate of its region.”
There is much beneath the surface that Ingersoll, in pigeonholing Blackness, could not see. Shermantown was a vibrant settlement. It was the home of Big Bethel A.M.E. Church, the first Black church in the city, dating back to the antebellum era. The church in turn housed the first school for freed people in 1865, organized by James Tate, a grocer and former slave, then taken over by the American Missionary Association a year later and named the Storrs School. Wheat Street Baptist Church and the First Congregational Church were also located there. Wheat Street itself was a major street that housed an inchoate Black business district that would later become famous as Auburn Avenue, still thriving today. And it was home to the growing popularity of commercial leisure, especially outlets for music and dance.
Shermantown, like the other Black neighborhoods, was a haven for newly freed people in search of life in the city that would enhance their autonomy and allow them to escape the strictures of bondage. At the center of this effort to create community were women, the majority of the city’s Black population. And essential to their existence was work. They were half of the Black workforce.
These women did impress Ingersoll, if nothing else, because of their ubiquity: “There are certain features that strike the stranger’s eye. On Mondays you may see tall, straight negro girls marching through the streets carrying enormous bundles of soiled clothes upon their heads,” he wrote. Domestic work was the primary occupation of Black women, and within that, laundry work dominated. By the time Ingersoll was visiting the city, laundry work was growing by leaps and bounds. There were more washerwomen than there were casual laborers among men (the largest single category of men’s work). Over the course of the 1870s, the number of Black washerwomen increased by 150 percent.