Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (51 page)

Philip possessed that business knowledge and stepped to the fore. “In matters concerning finances,” Maritcha wrote in her memoir, “he was an authority. His associates on the property committee gave him
the credit of the wise oversight and judgment that planned, elaborated and made operative a scheme by which certain lands in the city, the gift of Trinity Corporation have become pecuniarly productive.”
⁴⁴

The most important scheme was the purchase of a new church building. In 1881 St. Philip’s was composed of a respectable number of 150 families and 500 individuals, but the vestry continually worried about a fall-off in attendance. As early as 1875, it had decided that “the usefulness of this Parish would be vastly increased by changing the location of its place of worship to a more northerly or westerly part of the city.”
⁴⁵
As in the earlier move from Centre to Mulberry Street, St. Philip’s could ensure its survival only by following the intracity migration of black New Yorkers. As Italians streamed into the Mulberry Street area, blacks spread farther north and west.

On July 13, 1886, St. Philip’s sold its Mulberry Street church building to Catharine Lorillard Wolfe for forty-five thousand dollars. Once again, a Lorillard was involved in a real estate transaction with my family’s church. Catharine Wolfe was a granddaughter of Peter Loril-lard, the very same man who had hired young Peter Ray as an errand boy in his downtown factory many decades earlier. His daughter, Dorothea Ann, married John Wolfe, and Catherine was their only daughter. A New York merchant who had made his fortune in the hardware business, Wolfe retired at an early age to devote himself to philanthropic causes, giving liberally to Episcopal institutions in particular—parishes, schools, colleges, benevolent societies. At her parents’ death, Catharine came into a vast fortune that brought together the Lorillard and Wolfe estates. Never wed, she was often referred to as “the richest unmarried woman in the world.”
⁴⁶
Catharine took after her father, using her inheritance to carry on his philanthropic activities. Her greatest acts of charity were to her own church, Grace Episcopal Church, but they also included handsome donations to hospitals and institutions for New York’s poor.

Preoccupied with the plight of Italian immigrants, Catharine Wolfe established a private mission, the Italian Episcopal Mission of San Salvatore, in what had been St. Philip’s Church. In his book
The Battle with the Slum
, published in 1902, Jacob Riis vividly portrayed the historical shifts of Mulberry Street’s inhabitants and their impact on
the neighborhood’s buildings. The church, he maintained, abutted “Cat Alley,” which

was not an alley, either, when it comes to that, but rather a row of four or five old tenements in a back yard that was reached by a passageway somewhat less than three feet wide between the sheer walls of the front houses. These had once had pretensions to some style. One of them had been the parsonage of the church next door that had been by turns an old-style Methodist tabernacle, a fashionable Negroes’ temple, and an Italian mission church, thus marking time, as it were, to the upward movement of the immigration that came in at the bottom, down in the Fourth Ward, fought its way through the Bloody Sixth, and by the time it had traveled the length of Mulberry Street had acquired a local standing.
⁴⁷

Rummaging through a newspaper clipping file at the Museum of the City of New York, I found a newspaper article from the 1890s describing Catharine Wolfe’s Italian mission in some detail. The San Salvatore congregation included physicians, shoemakers, barbers, stone masons, as well as a few bootblacks and pushcart vendors. The minister hailed from Naples and conducted the entire service in Italian. His aim, he insisted, was to turn his parishioners into “good American citizens as well as good Christians.” To that end, he offered classes instructing the young men “in the manner and significance of voting, and in the duties of good citizenship.”
⁴⁸
Their place of origin and language certainly differed, but I wondered how dissimilar their commitment to Christianity and citizenship was from that of the congregation that had preceded them.

Let’s join Philip and his family as they attend services one Sunday morning in 1889. By dint of hard work and perseverance, Philip and the
vestry managed to purchase the former United Presbyterian Church building at 161 West Twenty-fifth Street for forty-eight thousand dollars. Outside, the building was a plain “red brick structure with brown stone coping and a mansard roof.” But the church’s interior and its services are truly breathtaking, living up to St. Philip’s reputation as the wealthiest and most fashionable black church in the entire metropolitan area. The service begins with an imposing procession: Sunday-school children enter carrying banners, and following them come the wardens, the vestrymen, and then the clergy as the choir sings the processional hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” in clear, ringing tones. Rev. Hutchins Bishop delivers a powerful sermon and the service concludes with the recessional hymn, “Gloria in Excelsis.”
⁴⁹

As we listen to the choir’s magnificent singing, we let our eyes wander and are struck by the extent to which the White, Ray, and Guignon families have put their stamp on the interior of the new church building. On an earlier visit, we had already admired St. Elizabeth’s Chapel on the lower level. Philip had created it as a memorial in honor of his recently deceased niece Bessie Thompson, a devoted parishioner and church organist, and had adorned it with a cross consecrated to his daughter who had died in infancy and an altar-rail dedicated to one of his sisters. But this Sunday morning we gaze in awe at the church’s new altar, a gift from Cornelia and her brother Peter Williams Ray in honor of their parents, Peter and Ann; it still graces the church sanctuary today, in its present location on 134th Street in Harlem. Designed in accordance with the denomination’s High Church aesthetics “in perpendicular Gothic style,” the New York
Sunday Recorder
deems it “one of the finest altars of its kind in New York or elsewhere.” The
Age
offers a fuller description:

From the richly molded base of the altar rise fourteen pinnacle buttresses forming ten bays and a canopied central recess which contains in a deep niche the Agnus Dei and resting on the Book of Seven Seals. The bays are filled with delicately executed tracery divided in two sections by moldings. The top of the altar is supported by a bold cornice enriched with a carved grapevine in conventional treatment. In
its execution, as well as in the substantial proportions of the different sections, the altar is conceded to be one of the best pieces of high art work in marble ever seen.
⁵⁰

At St. Philip’s, Cornelia had successfully pushed for a greater role for women in church affairs. At the same time and in much the same way, Maritcha Lyons and her friends of the younger generation were breaking new ground in the larger arena of social activism.

AS THE CENTURY DREW TO
a close, many black elite families continued to prosper, but across the nation the racial landscape was increasingly grim. The demise of Reconstruction in the late 1870s ushered in a period often referred to as the “nadir” that brought home the hard fact that emancipation was no longer the promise of a brighter future but a faded hope of the distant past. A virulent resurgence of white supremacy spread across the nation taking different guises: ideologies of Negro inferiority even cruder than what John Van Evrie had penned in the 1850s; the repeal of the Reconstruction civil rights laws; the retreat of the federal government from protecting black citizens; the rise of black codes, especially in southern states; disfranchisement; economic disempowerment; the increase in white mob violence, especially lynchings. Although their lives were secure, my family, their friends, and their acquaintances refused to sit back and passively watch the achievements of Reconstruction evaporate before their eyes. Far from being whitewashed blacks, they followed Crummell’s advice to develop the hardy muscle and strong fiber needed to engage in the stern battle for racial justice. Philip was at the forefront of many of these battles, stimulating his friends, as the
Eagle
put it, with his progressive spirit. His activism extended well beyond St. Philip’s to endeavors that spread out in concentric circles from community institutions to city affairs to national politics.

Philip’s collaborators included a growing number of women who were mostly of Maritcha’s generation. These younger women were fast becoming a force to be reckoned with, making their voices heard both in venues heretofore reserved for men and in organizations of their own.

In the 1880s, black elite men and women came together in two recently formed literary societies: New York’s Bethel Literary Association and the Brooklyn Literary Union. These organizations were similar to those of earlier times in their emphasis on education and intellectual development. But they differed sharply in other respects. First, men and women were no longer divided into separate societies but attended the same meetings together. Second, even though these associations continued to advance a racial uplift agenda, there was an increasing sense of shared knowledge among members. Third, conversation tended to focus on contemporary political issues rather than on specifically literary matters. These discussions made clear that members were definitely
not
indifferent elites who had turned their backs on the less fortunate of their race; rather, they were defiant race men and women committed to racial justice for all blacks.

Since T. Thomas Fortune was intimately involved with both organizations, it’s not surprising that the
Globe
, the
Freeman
, and the
Age
reported extensively on their activities. It was Fortune who at the beginning of 1883 called for the formation of the Bethel Literary Association and became its first president. Women filled the position of secretary and sat on the committee of rules and regulations alongside my grandfather, Jerome Bowers Peterson.
¹

Hewing to a traditional format, Bethel Literary offered lectures similar to those of the Philomathean Society in the 1830s and 1840s. Some of the speakers were the same. Shortly after the association’s founding, Charles Reason delivered a paper on “Material Education”
before a packed audience that included Peter Guignon. Aware of the few opportunities for advanced studies, Reason encouraged young men to persevere in “those branches of industrial education that go far toward furnishing him with a means of support outside the professions.” To emphasize his point, Reason offered his brother’s career as a model, rehearsing Patrick’s rise from apprentice in New York to prominent jeweler in Cleveland. He concluded with an eminently practical proposal: the formation of a committee that would keep a book listing and updating job openings.
²

Even more popular than the Bethel Literary Association’s lectures were its debates. Topics were announced in advance as were the debaters, two arguing in the affirmative, two in the negative. They centered on hotly contested issues raging in the larger black community, many of them echoing the later controversy between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Washington sought compromise, acceding to demands that blacks abandon political agitation and access to higher education in favor of manual training and labor in order to improve race relations with white southerners; but he also championed the development of black community businesses. While never denying the dignity of black labor, Du Bois insisted that without political rights and higher education blacks stood no chance of becoming citizens on a basis equal to whites. Hence, subjects debated at Bethel Literary included “Shall we support separate schools?”; “Resolved, that we need wealth more than we do education”; “Resolved, that we should encourage western emigration”; “Labor is a greater power than capital”; “That we owe no party a debt of gratitude”; and “That we need industrial more than academical education.” The answers were not always clear-cut. School integration was desirable, but how would black children fare in a majority-white classroom led by a white teacher? Was economic development a more productive path to racial equality than education? Which made more sense under present conditions, industrial or higher education? Would blacks be better off if they left overcrowded eastern cities to occupy vacant land in the West? Should they stick blindly with the Republican Party despite its failed promises?

Most astonishing to me was the presence of female debaters. Not
only did women now share a public venue with men, but they argued with them over policy on equal terms. And they were taken seriously. A Miss Crawford and a Mrs. J. L. Grant ably presented each side of the wealth versus education debate. A Mrs. Thompson stood on her own to promote western emigration, overwhelming her audience with statistics and compelling arguments. In contrast, her male opponent “failed to make a point and became hopelessly demoralized before the expiration of his ten minutes.”
³
Times had indeed changed.

Bethel Literary lasted less than a year. The newspapers offered no explanation for its demise. I hoped women’s increased participation and visibility weren’t the reason.

A few years later, black Brooklynites established the Brooklyn Literary Union and elected T. McCants Stewart president. Once again, women held positions as secretaries and served on the Board of Managers. Membership was open and free; theoretically at least, anybody could attend meetings.