Tag Archives: harlem

Election days, then and now

4 Nov

Looking for something fresh to write about on Election Day, I searched my father’s columns for wisdom from the past. A footnote in a column published in the New York Age on November 3, 1934, implored readers to elect “Mrs. Eunice Carter” to the New York State Assembly. The name had a familiar ring.

Five years ago, my cousin, Evelyn, sent me a text message with a copy of a paragraph from a book that quoted Ebenezer. The book, Invisible, by author and Yale legal scholar, Stephen L. Carter, is the biography of Stephen’s grandmother, Eunice Hunton Carter.  The book’s subtitle is: “The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”  

But before Eunice Carter became a prosecutor, developing the strategy that would bring down Mafia boss Lucky Luciano, she was picked by the Republican Party as their candidate for the Nineteenth District of the New York State Assembly. According to Stephen Carter, the GOP “needed a warm body” to run for the seat occupied by James Stephens, a Democrat and the only “colored” member of the Assembly at the time.

My father and his newspaper, The New York Age, were all in for Mrs. Carter.

“The Age, the more traditionalist of New York’s major Negro papers, labeled Eunice ‘exceptionally well qualified.’ The paper predicted ‘with certainty’ that she would win,” Stephen Carter wrote. “Age columnist Ebenezer Ray offered three reasons: ‘First, her platform is practical; secondly, it would give her the distinction of being the first Negro woman to attain such a position, and lastly, SHE CAN’T DO LESS THAN THE MEN.’  The column added: ‘Here is an opportunity for women voters to be clannish to one of their own sex.’”

Despite support from the Black press in New York and beyond and predictions that she was the “odds-on favorite,” Eunice Carter lost the election. The Baltimore Afro-American, which also had endorsed her, expressed surprise.

“The paper told readers that even as Eunice gave a conciliatory concession speech, she ‘looked as if her faith in humanity had been shaken,’” Stephen Carter wrote. “What went wrong?”

The author listed several possible reasons his grandmother lost, despite a “spirited campaign.” Her incumbent had likely benefitted from the patronage of Tammany Hall, the New York City Democratic political machine that dominated the city’s politics for decades. “In addition, although the impact would not be obvious for another decade, the segment of the community Eunice was seen to represent — tradition-bound, clannish, respectably middle-class — was losing its stranglehold on the politics of the darker nation. And, of course, at this time a substantial portion of the Negro and white electorate alike remained skeptical or perhaps even hostile toward female candidates,” Stephen Carter wrote.

Vote for Mrs. Eunice Carter

I’m happy to know that my father was forward-thinking enough to champion a woman’s candidacy. Still, there are echoes of today’s political climate.

My faith in humanity was shaken when Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election.

Stories of Eunice crisscrossing Harlem, inspiring crowds at churches, political clubs and civic organizations; her direct appeals to specific constituencies such as Black beauticians, took me back to Harris’ whirlwind 107 days on the campaign trail.

In Invisible, Carter added that another factor in Eunice’s defeat was that Black folks were going through a “partisan transformation.” In 1929 “African America still trended Republican. By 1934, Harlem was voting Democratic— the party won every contest in the neighborhood that year—and the same partisan tide that defeated Eunice was sweeping the darker nation in election precincts around the country.”

The 2024 presidential election exposed some partisan realignments as well, including an increased portion of Black men who voted for Harris’ opponent. And while I would not call their slight right shift a tide, it is worrisome. I also worry that the “tradition bound,” Democratic establishment might court Republicans at the expense of its progressive left flank.

I wonder what Ebenezer and Eunice would think about Harris or New York Democratic Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

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Dottings on a presidential reelection: Hate me if you dare

11 Nov

I’m re-posting an entry I originally published in February of 2011, which seems like ages ago. Last Tuesday, We The People overcame voter suppression campaigns, lies, bungled debates and obscene amounts of campaign spending to reelect President Barack Obama and to put down efforts to make him a one-term president. Now that the Florida vote has been counted, I thought I would add this year’s final electoral map.

The New New Deal, 2008, Photo illustration by Arthur Hochstein and Lon Tweeten. ( F.D.R. photo by Associated Press. Obama photo by John Gress, Reuters.)

“Never before have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said of Republicans during his reelection campaign in 1936.
Sound familiar? I wish.
Perhaps President Obama will take a page from FDR as he gears up for the 2012 campaign.
After all, these fightin’ words turned out to be winning words for FDR.
In honor of Presidents’ Day, I offer a column published by my father, Ebenezer Ray, on Nov. 14, 1936, shortly after the shellacking Roosevelt doled out to his opponent, Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas,  in 1936. Prior to the election, my father had written columns endorsing Roosevelt. But his support was not a given.  His employer, The New York Age, was a traditional supporter of the Republican Party.  The paper opposed the Democratic Party nationally because of its tolerance  of southern segregation.

FDR’s 1936 landslide.    Credit: 270toWin

Referring to himself in typical self-deprecating fashion, Ebenezer wrote: “This newcomer and political dunce failed to be convinced (1) that President Roosevelt was not the fit and proper person to guide the destiny of this country for the next four years and (2) that the Republican candidate was the better man.
. . . With his avalanche of votes in favor of the New Deal went the Negro vote, local and national, despite the fact that President Roosevelt represents the Party which disenfranchises the Negro in the South. Wherefore the Negro vote?
According to the man in the street, in the barbershop, in the restaurant and other proletariat among whom this writer moves, prosperity is the paramount issue. Up to 1929, they contend there was discrimination in the South, but we also had prosperity. Since 1929, and especially during the last Republican regime, there was still discrimination in the South but NO prosperity. In President Roosevelt is seen the capability of bringing prosperity from around  that elusive corner, made popular by Mr. Hoover.”
To illustrate his community’s support of the New Deal, Ebenezer described the changing atmosphere in the bank at the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Ave.
“In these premises, until president Roosevelt’s bank holiday, was situated the unlamented Chelsea Bank.  During its declining months one could easily race a bull about the premises without harming a depositor.  Nowadays, occupied by the Dunbar National Bank, during business hours the premises resemble a market rather than a bank. Of great concern to the poor man is the knowledge that whatever part of his earnings he is privileged to save is SAFE.
The great majority has reelected Roosevelt. ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God,'” Ebenezer concluded.
Robert Reich, former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration, who is now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote a column before the midterm election last fall, titled “Why Obama should learn the lesson of 1936, not 1996,” In it, Reich said: “The relevant political lesson isn’t Bill Clinton in 1996, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.”

Library of Congress

Reich continued:”By the election of 1936 the Great Depression was entering its eighth year. Roosevelt had already been president for four of them. Yet he won the biggest electoral victory since the start of the two-party system in the 1850s.” Reich wrote that while the key to Clinton’s victory was a booming economy, the key to Roosevelt’s was setting himself apart from the greed of the Republicans and their financiers and standing up for and with everyday people.

Back to Ebenezer’s column: At the end he offers a brief review of the theater adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, about a Hitler type character who attempts to dominate the United States:
“The capacity crowd which attended the Adelphi Theatre on West 54th Street Thursday evening last . . . is better testimony to the entertainment value of It Can’t Happen Here than any reviewer can write. For, after all, ‘It is the guest who is the judge of the meat,'” Ebenezer wrote.

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Accepting democracy in theory, while nullifying it in practice

3 Sep

 

“Democracy is predicated upon the principle of majority rule. In applying this principle to our political life, we find that our politico-economic masters have done an excellent job by accepting Democracy in theory, while they nullify it in practice. Through numerous subterfuges, such as race, poll tax, the domination of the two political parties by our economic rulers, literacy tests and other ways, democracy has been trampled under foot by a brazen but powerful minority. This minority has succeeded in dividing the majority on the bases of race, religion, sex, and what not, with the result that on election day they go to the polls, not as propertyless, exploited people seeking socioeconomic and political justice, but as white vs. blacks, good vs. bad, and so forth,” Frank Crosswaith, letter to the editor, the New York Age, Oct. 8, 1938.

One of the added delights of this research into my father’s writings is stumbling upon the voices of his colleagues and contemporaries.  For weeks, I have been looking for something that might have some historical resonance to the voter suppression activities that are taking place in 2012. I also was looking for something that might be appropriate for Labor Day.

I found a twofer, not among my father’s columns, but in a letter to the editor that ran in his paper written by Frank Crosswaith (1892-1965), a New York labor leader.  Born in what is now the U. S. Virgin Islands, Crosswaith came to New York at the age of 13 and devoted his life to improving labor conditions for workers, particularly those in Harlem.  A biography on the New York Public Library’s website describes him as “one of the most effective organizers of black workers in New York City,” during the 20s and 30s.

Though Crosswaith was based in Harlem and worked closely with unions that had significant numbers of blacks among their ranks, he also embraced and championed the cause of the white working class. He ran as the Socialist candidate for several statewide offices and although his election bids were unsuccessful, he drew strong multiracial support.

Periodically, Crosswaith and my father gave one another a nod in print. Crosswaith wrote a letter praising one of my father’s columns, which Ebenezer then printed in his Dottings space on Jan. 1, 1938. My father once singled out Crosswaith as one of the few orators who took spoke on the streets of Harlem who were worth listening to and would not massacre “the King’s English.”

In that Oct. 8 letter to the editor in the New York Age, Crosswaith singled out Sen. Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith (D-South Carolina). According to Wikipedia, Smith earned his nickname while serving in the House of Representatives when he said: “Cotton is king and white is supreme.”  Smith opposed women’s suffrage, arguing that it would apply the same rights as the 15th Amendment had granted to “the other half of the Negro race.”

During the 1938 Democratic Convention, Smith walked out when he saw that a black man was going to offer the invocation.

“Some day,” Crosswaith wrote,  “we are confident the people both black and white — the poor people who work in the mills and mine, in factory, on railroads in the school houses and on the farms will get wise to the Smiths and others who have kept them consigned to a life of long hard labor, who have robbed them of their labor power, who have prevented them from getting a full view of life, who have narrowed their vision to a glimpse of life only from behind the squalid walls of the slums. Some day these people will rise up; the scales of ignorance will fall from their eyes, they will learn at last to appreciate the power which is theirs through their numbers and their vital importance to industry and agriculture. And when that day comes, the bogey of race superiority, so attractive today, will be exposed for what it is: namely a device to weaken the ranks of the Negro and the white working class and thus continue the exploitation by a clever, scheming minority. “

To Cotton Ed Smith and “others of his ilk” Crosswaith had this message:

“Have your fun while you may . . .  Today is your day. In the very nature of things yours can be but a temporary victory which the united and enlightened action of all workers irrespective of race, creed, color, sex or nationality will inevitably destroy.“

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A Mother’s Day tribute

8 May

I queued this up a year ago just so I would remember to revisit it for Mother’s Day 2012. (Apparently, it went live several days ago.) My father never missed an opportunity to sing the praises of he mother, Malvina. It’s clear my grandmother was God-loving and generous to a fault. I wish I had a photo.

The New York Age May 20, 1933


Continue reading →

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‘If I were mayor of Harlem’

15 Apr

Last  Thursday, I got a call from a fellow blogger, Valerie Bailey, who was doing research on a Ted Yates, a black newspaper columnist whose career overlapped with my dad’s. I told Bailey, whose fascinating video blog is febone1960.net, that the name was familiar, and that I would get back to her if I found anything.

Then,  while  looking for a column to feature this week, I came across one my father published on April 14, 1934 titled “If I were Mayor of Harlem.” It is one of several “If I were . . . ”  pieces Ebenezer wrote, including “If I were editor ” and “If I were the Hitler of Harlem.” (I’m not quite ready to delve into that one.)

Under the headline of the mayoral column was a note: “With apologies to W.W.” Could that be Walter White, then head of the NAACP? Not sure.  What I did find was a note in another  of my father’s columns that referred to  Ted Yates. That column was likely what led Bailey to me.

In the April 14, 1934 column, my father rails against “soap box orators,” those who used the street corners of Harlem as their bully pulpits. My father, staunch defender of the King’s English that he was, seemed less offended by their opinions and more put off by their imperfect grammar.

“Those allowed on Lenox Avenue would have to pass a grammatical test by answering three questions on the principles of correct speaking. One of these questions would be: Why should IS not be used for ARE, not ARE for IS? Most of them, having apparently paid little attention to such principles, their elimination would be easy.”

Ebenezer also pledged to deal with teenagers who frequented movie theaters on school nights and who “interrupt older patrons  with their premature bits of sophistication” and parents who kept their little ones out past their bedtimes.

“I would give power to police officers to issue summonses to parents and guardians seen hauling tired looking little children behind them from theatres between 10 p.m. and midnight. In court they would be fined. Later than midnight they would be put in a cell without a bed so they could realize what it is to be sleepy and not be able to lie down. “

Further, he would call a press conference for the black press, with editors from the rival  New York Age and the Amsterdam News sitting front and center. “Then I would advise them to bury the hatchet.”

Back to Ted Yates: In a column published a month later, there is a note under the subhead “Petty Larceny.”  It read, “Ted Yates column: If I Were Mayor of Harlem in the Afro-Amer. After all, Ted, there is still something you can glean from an ancient rag.”

I guess Yates, who wrote for the Age and a number of other black papers,  borrowed that line for one of his own columns published in the Afro-American, which was based in Baltimore, but had a national edition. I’ve done a bit of searching in the Afro-American’s archives, but haven’t turned up the Yates’ column in question yet.

Perhaps my dad should have taken his own advice about burying the hatchet.

Click “continue reading” for the full column: BTW: Tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was nicknamed “The Mayor o Harlem.”
Continue reading →

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