The Black Pioneers of Los Angeles County: Celebrating, Commemorating and Debating the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, 1869-1876, Part Two

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Carrying on with this discussion, following Sunday’s gathering at the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation to hear progress on new collaborative efforts between the Foundation and its “The Long Road to Freedom” project, dealing with Mason’s 1855-1856 fight for her release from slavery and her life in Los Angeles for thirty-five years afterward, and the National Park Service’s “Journey to Freedom” within its Underground Railroad initiative, we look at more debate about, or opposition to, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, giving Black men the right to vote.

The Amendment was ratified by the required three-fourths majority of the states on 3 February 1870. Lewis G. Green, a prominent member of the small, but vibrant African-American community in Los Angeles, had to file suit against the county clerk to assert his suffrage right and this was accomplished and he was followed by other men who were enable to cast their votes in subsequent elections. We’ve previously discussed what transpired that year, so we’ll look at those that followed.

In 1871, not much was said in the Los Angeles Star about the first anniversary. The 8 April edition merely stated that “the colored element honored the anniversary of the birth of the Fifteenth Amendment, yesterday, with a dinner and dance.” In its 25 May issue, amid an infestation, the paper thought it clever to proclaim that “the grasshoppers are celebrating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, by a big feast all over Los Angeles county,” as if equating the devastation of the insects to what Black male voting rights were bringing to the nation.

If there were celebrations in 1872 and 1873, nothing was located in the press about it. In 1874, a “grand anniversary ball” was thrown at Stearns’ Hall, situated on the southwest corner of Los Angeles and Arcadia streets, where U.S. 101 runs through downtown today. An advertisement in the Los Angeles Express stated that, for $1, guests received “a choice collation,” or a light meal, while the two-person arrangements committee, consisting of Jeremiah Redding and Frederick Stevenson, “extend a cordial invitation to all those who may feel disposed to join in celebrating this holiday.”

The Los Angeles Herald of 1 April, the day after the event, briefly observed that “the colored people of this city held their Fifteenth Amendment ball in Stearns’ Hall last night” and reported that “there was quite a large turnout, and all passed off very pleasantly.” In mid-June, “Professor” Edward Cain spoke at the Merced Theatre, with the Herald of the 16th treating it as humorous as the speaker discussed questions of race and especially focused on the purported fact that all humans descended from Adam, which led the paper to quote Cain as stating, “I’d like you to tell me if I ain’t your brudder?” Another post can discuss Cain’s several lectures in Los Angeles, but this one ended with the reprinting of a poem of his:

THE COLORED MAN’S HYMN TO LIBERTY

America! my native home!

Tho’ cold thy wintry looks

Thy mountains crowned with driven snow,

And ice bound are thy brooks,

Yet colder far the colored man’s heart

Though e’er far he roam,

To whom no joy these words impart,

America, my home,

CHORUS—then huzza for America;

It is our native home

I think that every one may say

I do not want to roam.

The Fifteenth Amendment gives the right

To breathe a purer air,

A precious boon that is so bright

They love it everywhere.

CHORUS—then huzza,

But we hold no grudge within the heart;

‘Tis noble to forgive;

Thy blessings Lord, to all impart

In union let us live.

CHORUS— then huzza,

Although we be illiterate

Although we be but crude,

Ne’er let a man insinuate

We have no gratitude.

CHORUS— then huzza,

With life and light our guarantee

In ages hence to come

Great patriarchs will clearly see

The E PLURIBUS UNUM

CHORUS—then huzza,

The 1875 celebration was held at the Grange Hall, recently opened in the upper floor of a commercial structure erected by F.P.F. Temple on the west side of Spring Street across from his Temple Block (now the site of Los Angeles City Hall.) The 13 April event began at 2 p.m. and included “literary exercises, Music, and an Oration by the Rev. J. Fletcher Jordan of Sacramento,” while the ball took place at 8 p.m., with tickets costing $2. The Committee of Arrangements expanded significantly with Redding joined by Green, Samuel Hall, Samuel Jones, Horatio Marteen and unnamed others.

The Herald (which made a comment on the 9th that “under the provisions of the civil rights bill, white people can claim admission”) of the day following stated that the gathering met in the Good Templars’ Hall, the Main Street meeting place of local temperance advocates. Another Sacramento First African Methodist Episcopal Church pastor was named president of the day and read the Emancipation Proclamation and the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, while Redding was secretary and the program included a prayer by a Stockton minister. Nothing, however, was said about Jordan and the piece ended with “all passed off pleasantly, and the enjoyment of the day was concluded by a ball which lasted far into the night.”

In its coverage, the Express of the same date adjudged that “our colored citizens carried out their celebration . . . in an excellent manner,” adding that Green was absent and replaced by Redding. It also commented on the oration (though it called Jordan by his middle name) and stated that it “was very well delivered, and listened to with great satisfaction by the audience, many of whom were whites.” The paper ended by stating that “the entire ceremonies passed off creditably” and that the ball was “kept up to [a] late hour.”

On 3 April 1876, reported the Express of the following day in the briefest of terms, “the colored people had a gala time at their Fifteenth Amendment ball,” held again at Stearns’ Hall. The only other remark was that “there was a large attendance, and the evening passed off to the utmost satisfaction of all.” Whether because the local economy was in a doldrums because of the recent statewide financial crash, following the national depression which began in 1873, and for other reasons, no other celebrations or commemorations of the passage of the amendment could be located in the Angel City.

That did not mean, however, that editorializing about it ended, especially when it came to the Chinese, whose larger numbers and, presumably, foreign character posed more of a threat to whites than African-Americans did. Part one of this post included some early expressions of how the amendment could not apply to the Chinese, who were subjected in late October 1871 to the horrors of a massacre in which hundreds of white and Latino rioters lynched seventeen men and a teenage boy.

Anti-Chinese sentiment, however, skyrocketed when the economic depression took hold, as anti-immigrant feeling typically does, and this was reflected most concretely in the Workingmen Party movement of the later Seventies and then the federal act of 1882 that halted Chinese immigration. The 22 October 1875 issue of the Herald, two months after the panic that burst forth in San Francisco and spread to Los Angeles, where the major business casualty was the imminent failure of the Temple and Workman bank, remarked,

Somebody wants to know if the Chinese born in this country will be voters when they reach man’s estate? Why not? See [the] Fifteenth Amendment. They are native born and race[,] color or previous condition of servitude, cannot keep them from the ballot box.

While there were occasional references to an acceptance, however grudging, of the legitimacy of the amendment, including former California attorney general and current Angel City attorney and Assembly member, John R. McConnell’s early 1876 resolution that the state “recognizes the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments as the legitimate result of the [Civil] war,” when it came to Black men voting, another Herald piece from 25 June included a refinement in his views when it came to the Chinese.

He was already credited by the paper for his stance on a ban on all Chinese immigration and it reprinted excerpts of his “Anti-Chinese resolutions” offered at the Democratic Party’s state convention in 1869. This, of course, hearkens back to the first part of this post and vehement sentiments against the ratification by California of the amendment by the Los Angeles News, a Democratic paper.

McConnell’s broadside was no less vitriolic, if somewhat more refined and legalistic in tone, than that of the News as he launched a rhetorical tirade that should be read in full and in some respects compared to some utterances of our own time:

Resolved, That we are opposed to the adoption of the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, believing the same to be designed, and, if adopted, certain to degrade the right of suffrage; to ruin the laboring white man, by bringing untold hordes of Pagan slaves (in all but name) into direct competition with his efforts to earn a livelihood, to build up an aristocratic class of oligarchs in our midst, created and maintained by Chinese votes; to give the negro and Chinaman the right to vote and hold office; and that its passage would be inimical to the best interests of our country; in direct opposition to the teaching of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the other founders of the Republic; in flagrant violation of the plainest principles upon which the superstructure of our liberties were [sic] raised; subversive of the dearest rights of the different States; and a direct step toward anarchy and its natural sequence, the erection of an empire upon the ruins of constitutional liberty.

In fall 1876, a strange presidential election led to the raising of Rutherford B. Hayes to the office, even though he’d lost both the popular and electoral votes to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, while the latter of three Southern states and a single Oregon elector were in dispute—a special Congress-appointed special commission determined in March 1877 that all twenty of those votes were to be awarded to Hayes, giving him a suspicious one-vote majority. Moreover, Tilden swept the rest of the South, so the commission’s actions were, of course, very controversial.

Hayes’ assumption of office also meant the almost immediate end of Reconstruction and any further efforts to implement the requirements of the Fifteenth Amendment were blunted by Jim Crow-era literacy tests, poll taxes and other tactics to disenfranchise African-American male voters in the South. The president commented in his address to Congress in early December 1878 that “in some of the States in which the colored people have been unable to make their opinions felt in the elections, the result is mainly due to influences not easily measured or remedied by legal protection.” In Louisiana and South Carolina, two of the disputed states in the 1876 election, and other areas of the South, Hayes went on, “the rights of the colored voters have been overridden and their participation in the election not permitted to be either general or free.”

In the 1880 election, which pitted Democratic former Civil War General Winfield Scott Hancock (who had close ties locally because of his Army service here in the three years before that conflict) against another general, Republican James A. Garfield, the Express of 29 October made a point of looking back to March 1869 and the Fifteenth Amendment debate in Congress. It noted that, when a California member of the House of Representatives called for a resolution that stated “this house never intended that the Chinese or Mongolians should become voters,” Garfield voted against it, though the overall tally was overwhelming: 106 to 42 against.

In Los Angeles, the Black population remained small and, therefore, not of concern to white power brokers, who were largely Democratic through the 1870s. A notable shift, however, came with the next decade, especially during the Boom of the Eighties, where a major burst of population favored the Republicans. So, during the heyday of that period, the Los Angeles Times, a Republican stalwart, of 17 September 1887 commented that “the Fifteenth Amendment admirably rounds out the noble work begun by the Thirteenth Amendment” and that these, along with the Fourteenth Amendment, meant that the United States was “a Government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” quoting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address of 1863.

Questions, comments and platforms and projects offered today about the legal conditions and qualifications for voting, the legislative status of civil rights and others are a reminder of why it is important for us to understand the history of these and other related issues, including when the vital 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War and were transformational to the promise if not the fulfillment of the American democratic experiment.