by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was a great pleasure yesterday to attend a gathering at the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation to hear about the early stages of collaboration between the Foundation and its “The Long Road to Freedom” project and the National Park Service’s initiative on the Underground Railroad called the “Journey To Freedom.” Historian Kevin Waite, who is working on a biography of the life and times of Biddy Mason, whose freedom was secured in 1856 by a habeus corpus (Constitutionally-defined unlawful detainer) suit in Los Angeles decided by District Court Judge Benjamin I. Hayes, has been working with NPS interns on key elements of the Mason story.
One of the interns, Isaiah Martin, who comes from Indiana, met with me last week to discuss the likelihood that Robert Smith, the former Mormon slave owner who took Mason and her family from the Deep South to Utah and then to the colony at San Bernardino, secured supplies in Los Angeles for an attempt to transport the slaves to Texas. It is said by Mason’s grandson, Robert C. Owens, that Smith sequestered the group in Santa Monica (likely now, Rustic) Canyon, to evade scrutiny before his clandestine effort to leave greater Los Angeles.
Another intern is working on documenting the site where Smith had his home and farm at San Bernardino prior to seeking to effect his escape with the idea that, somewhere near the northeast corner of the intersection of interstates 10 and 215, a location can be landmarked that will be part of the NPS initiative as well as the Foundation program. It is certainly exciting to see the progress being made in bringing more public awareness, as was recently the case with the effort to rename Pershing Square after Biddy Mason, to this remarkable, but underappreciated aspect of our regional history.
Inspired by the event and reflecting that one right that Biddy Mason could not exercise, though her female descendants could, just about thirty years after her 1891 death, was that of voting, this post looks at the aftermath of successful petition by Lewis G. Green and other African-American men in Los Angeles to secure their right of suffrage as guaranteed by the early 1870 passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. A previous post here covered the implementation from that year of the landmark change.
Green, who soon became the janitor for the Temple and Workman bank and, likely, the Temple Block, in which it was housed, was forced to initiate legal action against the Los Angeles County clerk to force the matter on his right to cast ballots in elections and this, almost fifteen years after the Mason habeus corpus case, is almost certainly the second most important legal case Black Angelenos had in 19th century Los Angeles.
It should be noted that, in the months leading up to the ratification of the amendment, there was local and statewide concern about other applications of this groundbreaking addition to the foundational and aspirational governing document for our nation, including to other people of color, namely, the indigenous and to the Chinese, while, nationally, women naturally pressed the case for suffrage, as well.
The 28 April 1869 issue of the Los Angeles News (a pro-Union paper during the Civil War, but then co-owned by pro-Confederate Southern-born Andrew J. King) observed that quite a few states had ratified the amendment and it was just a matter of time before the three-fourths required for national adoption would be reached. While Southern states were forced by Reconstruction following the Civil War to do so, the paper added that “they are not, like the Pacific States, liable to be overrun by Chinese pagans,” as if religion had anything to do with the right to vote.
Moreover, it was ridiculously asserted that the effect on the west coast was such that the “Chinese, may and will, under the new suffrage law, become the dominant race in a few years” and the paper wondered “how can our State be saved from Chinese domination”? The paper estimated there were 100,000 “already among us,” though whether this was the Golden State, the coast or the nation was not specified and one source states the number throughout the country was 63,000, with more than three-quarters in California.
It went on to claim that, with overcrowded conditions in China, a million migrants could come to America in just a few years and it likened this nonsensical possibility to the claim that the South had been handed, through the machinations of Reconstruction, to Black people to the detriment of whites. The News warned that “the people should act upon the matter before it becomes too late,” by electing legislators who would pass a law to ban Chinese immigration, this being “the only security for the domination of the white race.” Otherwise, the jeremiad concluded,
Permit the hordes of pagans who are daily seeking our shores, to come here [and] they will avail themselves of the right to become citizens and voters; while the suffrage amendment can and will be defeated in this State, our people have no power to defeat it in other States, and must prepare themselves to resist its influences by prohibiting the further immigration of Chinese, and every man who favors a white man’s Governmet [sic], should vote for no man who does not commit himself to the doctrine of no more Chinese immigrants.
A couple of weeks later, the News returned to the topic, under the heading of “Chinese Immigration and White Labor,” and asserted that the 15th Amendment meant that “negro and Chinese equality is forced upon the States of the Pacific.” It dismissed purported Republican Party claims that whites would still be the supervisors (and, therefore, superiors) of Chinese doing menial labor, with the latter “elevated by being brought into contact with the pagan immigrant.”
The paper countered that if “the Mongolian” were to remain in the “inferiority of race” which was their lot in life that was a move toward no “demoralization,” but, the argument went on that “history does prove that where the superior and inferior races have been brought in contact on terms of equality, the superior race has always suffered by the contact, and mongrelism and demoralization has always followed. Keeping the Chinese in drudgery and there would be “no serious influence socially upon society”:
Make him a citizen, however, . . . and he meets his co-laborer of the white race upon terms of perfect equality before the law; he is no longer the quiet, unobtrusive coolie, but a politician and voter, who has an influence on the Government that must sooner or later, seriously affect our system of civilization . . . It is the poor man and woman who have no gilded fence of wealth and luxury, to protect them that suffer by contact . . . civilization is crushed at the ballot-box by the hordes of hireling barbarians [and] that must inevitably suffer by contect [sic] with the mongolian, when it is forced upon him by terms of equality as proposed by the Fifteenth amendment to the Constitution.
At the end of June, the News analyzed a San Francisco paper’s coverage of the impending ratification of the amendment specific to “Negro Suffrage” with the latter in favor of it as needed for postwar peace and harmony and because “the ballot is the only protection against oppressors.”
The former decried this argument as baseless and blasted the “fanaticism of the north” for foisting on the South disenfranchisement on white people (men) at the expense of Blacks. Not satisfied with this tack, the News rose to hysteria by proclaiming,
Instead of securing peace, unity and harmony, [the Amendment] has imbued the barbarous African—already cruel and beastly—with a feeling of security and superiority, warranting them in the commission of every disgrace and outrage which the African brute and the [white] New England fiend could unitedly devise.
The only recourse for Southern men was “by submitting it to it gracefully” and ensuring “the enfranchisement of the whites” and it claimed that “freedom and suffrage are not synonymous” because “if such was the case, why is not suffrage equally necessary for the freedom of women, Chinese and Indians?”
Of course, the News wouldn’t ask any of these latter three groups for their views and it accused the San Francisco sheet of having “unwittingly thrown itself upon the broad principle of universal suffrage. It ended by averring that “Negro, Chinese and woman suffrage are equally obnoxious to every thinking man or woman who has the welfare of the American people and institutions at heart.”
The 7 May 1871 edition of the News found it “amusing to witness the trial of the squaws” in the court of Justice of the Peace John J. Trafford where one indigenous woman, in the absence of defense counsel, was told she could cross-examine a witness, but was unable to perceive what this meant, as she was unable to understand the nature of the proceedings against her.
No solid evidence existing, the case was dismissed, but the dismissive paper added that “some special legislation is badly needed to enable this class of cases to receive proper treatment,” but it added that “no Fifteenth Amendment whatever can extend to them the benefit of our laws.” The main native figure was María Baños was deemed to be “an illustrious virago—a heroine in her way” because of her pugilistic prowess and because she was “enough to terrify any man.”
It wasn’t just the News that lambasted the Amendment and the thought of people of color being able to vote. The Los Angeles Star of 20 June 1873 noted that an indigenous person from Pala, in northern San Diego County, sought to be registered, with supporters (including, presumably, attorneys) stating that “all of the Indians who have lost or severed their tribal relations are entitled to the privileges of citizenship under the Fifteenth Amendment,” while also citing the inherent lack of fairness to those who paid taxes—as in “no taxation without representation.”
The Star, however, was especially dismissive of the latter, claiming that natives at work offer “but slight exertion on their part, as their wants are far below those of our higher order of civilization. From a more technical and legalistic perspective, the paper added that, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo requiring that residents of Mexican California had to elect to be American citizens within six months of ratification, the native people did not explicitly do this and, consequently, they forfeited those rights. As to those natives who were not adults in 1848, the paper merely noted, “we are curious to see the result of this question” in the courts.
It seems likely that the indigenous people, so rapidly diminished in numbers over decades, and African-Americans being so few in number, were nowhere near the threat to whites in greater Los Angeles than the Chinese, who, though only around 200 in population, were expected to become much more numerous (the million figure aside) in coming years. Still, the local press sometimes referred in mocking terms to “Fifteenth Amendments,” or Black people, with three examples of 1871 and another from the following year cited here.
The 25 February edition of the News reported on “a row occurring between two Fifteenth Amendments at a house on Main street.” The fistfight soon turned into a shooting with one man wounded in the neck and it was added that “the shooting son of Ham has been missing since the occurrence.”
The 29 June issue of the paper, under the title of “The Wrong Place,” commented that “a Fifteenth Amendment” was in El Monte, a town largely populated by white Southerners and the childhood home of King, and was ” ignorant of the place in which his lines had fallen.” In what sounded a lot like the language of the Jim Crow South, it was added that the Black man “went about putting on airs and indulging in the insolence natural to a ward of the nation.” It was claimed that the unnamed person “was guilty of an impudent personal insult to a gentleman . . . and received a sound thrashing.” As it this wasn’t enough, the piece ended with this ominous warning,
The Monte isn’t a good place yet for saucy Negroes: in fact it need Ku Klux legislation badly as its people are not only averse to being domineered over by negroes, but also good democrats.
In its edition of 28 August, the Star briefly recorded that a deputy constable at the depot of the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad on Alameda Street near Commercial Street arrested, on an allegation of selling counterfeit gold, George Clark, who was described as “an animated shadow of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.”
The 4 April 1872 issue of the paper covered the “Carnival of the Juveniles,” which took place at the skating rink, located in the Temple Block. Three dozen young skaters were dressed in costume and competed for prizes based on their skills, while also dressed in costumes. These included as girl dressed as a city volunteer firefighter, another as Red Riding Hood, one as a “‘Heathen Chinee’ boy” with much attention paid to the “peculiarity of her costume,” and yet another as “a dashing young damsel of the specie Fifteenth Amendment,” though she “infused a little more dignity in the character than necessary.” Clearly, she needed expert adult instruction in how to properly mock and dehumanize a person of color, not having this innately.
Another stark viewpoint about the amendment came from the News and its 19 April 1871 edition, as it briefly quoted “a colored poet of Memphis” who had “reduced the Fifteenth Amendment and the enforcement bill to rhyme.” The short piece of verse was:
It is a sin to steal a pin
A crime to cut a throat;
But a darn sight bigger to stop a n—-r,
From putting in his vote.
We will return tomorrow with part two of this post, so please check back in with us then.