NYC MARCH FOR CIVIL RIGHTS | NAACP's James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson, c. 1917.

July 28, 2020—On this day in 1917, 10,000 Blacks organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) marched on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Credit for this is given to novelist-poet-songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), who was also a lawyer, a U.S. consul overseas and a leader of the NAACP.

Behind the scenes at the NAACP was Inez Milholland Boissevain's father, John E. Milholland, who was the NAACP's first Treasurer. Inez, of course, died in 1916 and her father would still be grieving.

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a hotel headwaiter and his mother was a teacher at the segregated Stanton School, which  Johnson attended until he went to his school. He grew up in a middle-class home, and his mother encouraged him to pursue his interests in reading and music.

Johnson attended high school and college at Atlanta University. He received his bachelor’s degree 1894. After college, Johnson became the principal of Stanton School, and expanded the school to include a high school. He also began studying law.  In 1898, he was admitted to the Florida Bar, the first Black person to be admitted.

Johnson continued to serve as principal and began practicing law. In addition, he wrote  poetry and songs. In 1901, Johnson decided to pursue a career in writing. He and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, left for New York City to write songs for musicals. They composed about two hundred songs for Broadway.
I
n New York, Johnson also became involved in politics. In 1904, he served as treasurer for the Colored Republican Club. In 1906, the Roosevelt Administration appointed Johnson as the United States consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. In 1909, he served as consul in Corinto, Nicaragua until 1913. In addition to his service as consul, during this time, Johnson anonymously published his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912).

In 1916, Johnson accepted the position of field secretary for the NAACP.  He worked at opening new branches and expanding membership. In 1920, the NAACP appointed him executive secretary. In this position, he was able to bring attention to racism, lynching and segregation. After ten years of serving as executive secretary, Johnson accepted a creative writing teaching position at Fisk University.

Johnson developed his own philosophy on lessening racism in America. While W.E.B. Du Bois advocated intellectual development and Booker T. Washington advocated industrial training to combat racism, Johnson believed it was important for Blacks to produce great literature and art. By doing so, Johnson held that Blacks could demonstrate their intellectual equality and advance their placement in America. 

One of his more popular works was God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). In 1927, he also reissued his first novel under his own name. Johnson died in 1938, after a train hit the car his wife was driving.

Sources: NAACP History.

MOUNT INEZ | 100 Years Later, Lewis Makes Name Change Stick

From the Elizabethtown Post, December 7, 1916.

October 9, 2019–Yesterday evening, the Lewis (Essex County, NY) Town Council voted to rename Mount Discovery. The new name is "Mount Inez".

The mountain is named after Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886-1916), who spent her childhood and summers here and is buried on a hill in the graveyard behind the Lewis church.

This is the fulfillment of a name change made after Inez's  death in 1916, by the then-owner of the property, John E. Milholland, her father. 

The commitment was at that time apparently formalized by the then government of the Town of Lewis. It was announced in the Elizabethtown Post on December 7, 1916, and was featured on the front page of the New York Times a few days later. 

However, the name change was not forwarded to and memorialized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (USBGN), part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, or the New York State Board on Geographic Names.  

Through diligent work by Nancy Duff Campbell, a century later this error was yesterday rectified as a vote was taken by the Lewis Town Council in favor of the name change. Your blogger sent the following letter to the Lewis Town Council in advance of the meeting, and to the USBGN. That evening, the Lewis Town Board formally approved the name change. The last stop in the process will be at the USBGN.

October 8, 2019 

To the Lewis Town Council, Lewis, NY 

Dear Supervisor Monty and the Lewis Town Council, 

This is to support renaming Mt. Discovery as Mt. Inez. 

I am a huge fan of Inez Milholland. She was married to the brother, Dutchman Eugen Boissevain of my grandmother (Olga Boissevain). My mother met Inez when Inez was first married in 1913 and the couple went to visit Eugen's relatives in Holland. My mother described Inez to me in great detail, how sweet-smelling she was and how she brought with her a gift of a Kewpie Doll (the doll with little wings in the back), which was the rage at the time. 

Inez proposed to Eugen on the Cunard ship Mauretania and they were married in the Kensington Town Hall in London on Bastille Day 1913. The idea was they wanted to go to Holland as a married couple, not just engaged. They were going to keep it a secret from Inez's father, John Milholland. By this time Inez was already a national figure, having led the suffrage parades in New York and Washington, DC. She was also well known in London as a disciple of the Pankhursts (she was proud to call herself a Suffragette, as the Pankhurst followers did, not just a suffragist). 

So the attempt to keep the wedding a secret was futile. It was featured on the front page of all the newspapers and that's where John E. Milholland read about it in the New York Times the next day. He wanted Inez to marry Guglielmo Marconi, the radio guy, who actually proposed to Inez on another Cunard ship when Inez was not yet in college. Inez accepted, but Marconi's Irish mother (a cousin of Eugen's Irish mother) was distressed that Inez would go to the United States and talked her son out of it. Inez later said she loved the radio but didn't want to marry it. 

In an effort to keep the memory of Inez memory alive, I wrote a play about her that was produced as a staged reading in the Lewis church where she is buried (it was also staged in six other locations). I maintain a website about her, www.inezmb.blogspot.com. I was the secretary and organizer of a national committee to pay for the restoration of the iconic painting of Inez that hangs in the Belmont-Paul building next to the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington (https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2010/04/inez-milholland-portrait-restoration-planned.html. The Committee was headed by members of the Boissevain (notably Al Boissevain, Eugen's nephew) and Milholland families and included Margaret Gibbs of the Essex County Historical Society. The painting was restored to the highest standards. 

A century ago, the Lewis Town Council reportedly decided to rename the mountain. It's not too late to make good on the promise. The world owns the memory of Inez Milholland, but only Lewis owns her gravesite and the mountain that your predecessors in office promised to rename in her honor. As the logline of a recent movie, "The Silent Soldier and the Portrait," puts it, "If the Universe offers you a second chance, take it."

John

John Tepper Marlin, Ph.D.                                                                      teppermarlin@aol.com . personal cell: 646-250-4915

Moderate Republicans v. "Reckless" Republicans

I am reading more than usual these days. One reason: several gifts of fine books that kind friends gave me for my birthday earlier this month. One observation I read today caught my attention:

Republicans who have been Republicans all their lives are up in arms [over] the most reckless lawmaking body that ever sat at Albany. It was the first in the history of the United States, to my knowledge, that ever went so far as to attempt to bridle the press. True, the Anti-Cartoon bill was defeated by the Assembly, but the mere fact that such an infamous measure should have been seriously put forward in the name of the Republican State organization and passed by the Republican Senate was enough to damn the legislature for all time.

You may not have heard of an Anti-Cartoon bill, other than in certain countries with large Islamic populations. I should fess up that the comment above was made in an interview on April 29, 1897 with New York City Republican John E. Milholland in The New-York Journal. Milholland was the father of suffragette Inez Milholland, and during the last 15 years of his life was one of a minority of faithful Lincoln Republicans.

But an Anti-Cartoon bill is not stranger than some anti-environmental and anti-women statements in the GOP primary. Moderate Republicans such as William Ruckelshaus, the first federal EPA Administrator, are on record as saying they don't recognize the GOP of today and have endorsed Democrats.