by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As we take our look at the life and career of Dr. Monroe A. Majors further into the 1910s, he continued his diverse interests beyond medicine to politics, speeches and writing, including early in 1914 a poetic tribute published in the Black-owned Chicago Defender to John C. Buckner, who in the last half of the 1890s was the only African-American to serve in the Illinois legislature and was also a major in the state’s National Guard. When he died at the end of 1913, some 6,000 mourners attended his funeral and Majors wrote of him in this sample:
With time and place, and ink, and pen,
And muse inspired to write the good of men,
I should like so much to tell of one known well,
Who in the harness dying, fighting fell.
He was a man untouched by sordid things,
With a soul of princes, and a heart of kings.
He did not grovel, nor stoop to what is wrong,
Deep in the truth of things, his faith was strong.
The 11 July edition of the Defender reported that, the following day, Majors was to speak on “The Woman Suffrage Question” at the Frederick Douglass Center, a settlement house located between the Armour Square and Prairie Shores sections of the Windy City—this talk occurring as the movement gained more steam towards the enactment of the 19th Amendment.
At the end of November, also in the Defender, Majors penned a lengthy essay regarding a meeting between President Woodrow Wilson and William M. Trotter, a major figure in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in which the two men argued heatedly about Wilson’s policy of racial segregation for federal jobs and the President ordered Trotter to leave because he was offended by his tone of voice.
Majors acknowledged “the delicate situation, but asked:
Has not the President of the United States kept his mouth completely shut on the ugly insults heaped upon a race of people merely because the South, through its political agents, wishes to fashionalize [sic] its prejudices and perpetuate its ugly humors against its citizens, whose only crime is having a dark complexion?
The doctor marveled at a situation in which a legitimate set of grievances could not be aired honestly and directed toward the president, who was the chief executive of all Americans and who met with all kinds of people and groups, including Socialist labor activists and suffragists, and did not come away offended when confronted openly with controversial issues.
Majors wondered “what in heaven’s name does President Wilson want us to submit to now?” after reassigning federal positions from Black to white men, and then exclaimed,
But here! judge, oh, ye gods, the educated Afro-American, speaking with the voice of the advanced couriers of civilization, with a mouthpiece from the classic halls of Harvard College [from which Trotter earned a bachelor’s degree in 1895 and a master’s the next year], lisping in proper verbiage utterances only forbidden from the black man’s tongue! Prejudice, the holocaust to a race of twelve million citizens, who have no voice in Congress, bereft of political power, and yet a Sampson betrayed into the hands of wicked Philistines, paying taxes upon over a billion dollars in a country that gives cognizance to the inhuman orgy of truth-distorting infamy called prejudice, which Afro-Americans are unable to mitigate.
Majors reminded readers that Wilson, a Democrat, received the vote of many Black men in 1912 “into his bewildering maze of academic dreams” with many who “thought they had found a new Lincoln who would free them from the slavery of political deception.” In the recent midterm election, however, a good number of African-Americans went back to the Republicans, which, it was suggested, had some role for “the uncanny reception” given to Trotter.
Not long after 1915 opened, however, Majors authored an essay for the Defender in which he said it was fine to write about Black progress, but “in spite of it [the race] is being laughed at, sneered at, scoffed at and discounted, discredited and disregarded in a multiplicity of ways by the Jews, Greeks, Italians and other foreigners.” These latter ethnic groups accepted African-American patronage in their businesses and the money transacted, but he asked “readers, do you know of any Jew, Greek or Italian spending money with Negroes in business?” He also asserted that members of these groups learned to say the N-word before much else in English.
What was needed was “the success of race enterprises,” as a subheading put it, because enough successful Black businesses and race patronage of them “is what makes a people respected.” Adding “we are not doing our full duty,” the writer concluded that
The race is rapidly coming into its own along the line of appreciation and acknowledgment. Just a little more awakening in matters of business and the proper understanding of how it should be conducted will eventually bring us into the serious consideration and respect of those who sneer, disregard and discredit us.
In the 4 October edition of the Chicago Tribune, Majors was quoted as telling an audience of the Progressive Negroes League “the negro must stop complaining and whining. We must learn to hear the truth spoken about us, even though it may at times condemn us.” He asserted that Black Americans lived in the greatest period in human history, but “it is to be deplored that the race suffers from a lack of organization.”
The Defender of 27 November published resolutions offered by the physician following the death of Booker T. Washington about two weeks prior for the Texas Fellowship Club. These recognized “this great hero” and heralded “the great work which engaged his ceaseless activities” and involved “the great principles he taught, and practiced, [as well as] the great truths he advocated as cardinal doctrines.” While he’d earlier rejected the idea, Majors did write that Washington, in addition to being one of America’s finest citizens, was the “foremost leader” of African-Americans.
As the year came to a close, Majors critiqued, for the Black-owned Indianapolis Freeman (he lived there previously for a short period), the film, The Birth of a Nation, first released as The Clansman, the name of the book from which it was based, long considered a classic in terms of filmmaking and technique, but also a blatantly racist recasting of the history of the South after the Civil War. He began by inquiring, “is the great white race of America becoming a degenerate race?”
He was angered by “seeing an entire race held up to scorn, and the most fiendish attempt to gratify a callous hardened human heart over curious, at what may have happened fifty years ago!” Majors then asked,
Why may not the curtain of cupidity and cunning deviltry be lifted from the black pages of our American history that the evil-minded may just as zealously portray the blood curdling transactions of the Salem witchcraft? Why may not the ugly horrors of a few thousand inhuman orgies wherein every form of debauchery and marauding outlawry perpetuated to the last disgusting limitation, expected only in brute creation[,] be brought back to the horrifying memory of the present civilization? . . . Has justice fled to brutish beasts, and men lost their reason? . . . Is the [Black person] the general disturber and manufacturer of all the deviltry and general cussedness extant? Are there only black pictures in the rogues gallery? Are there only Negroes in the jails and penitentiaries? Are there only black pickpockets, thugs and cut throats?
While not asserting “any great claim for the Negro,” Majors pointed out that they “projected independently along every line of social, religious and moral development [their] own organizations that make a people respected and proud,” while “no other race has had to grow amid the hindrance and prejudice . . . and yet in spite of this ever present rank human injustice we average up fairly well with the rest of the world’s humanity.”
Concluding that “the immediate concern of the Negro may become the general concern of all,” while “the careless and ruthless oversight of injustice dealt out to the despised Negro may bring ruin . . . upon all other races,” Majors asked one more question:
Would it not be in keeping with the noblest American spirit to blot out such a travesty and infamous slander of a race of helpless people, as his prison conveying nostrum, viz: “The Birth of a Nation?”
The 22 July 1916 edition of the Colorado Statesman, an African-American newspaper in Denver, published an essay Majors wrote and which first appeared in the Freeman, and titled “The Dare-Devil Daring and Valor of our Soldiers.” The topics dealt with Black troops sent in to México during the era of American conflict with Pancho Villa, after he conducted a raid on a New Mexico town.
The doctor noted that “as has always been the case, it was the Negro blood being shed, soldiers’ rich red blood, blood of Negroes who have graduated in discipline and trained to the minute, and who can whip their number four times over in any other kind of living men.” He asserted that “in any great American crisis,” it was “the dogged, intrepid manhood of the Negro [that] helped in a large measure” and that white Army officers “admit that from a military viewpoint there are America’s greatest asset.
Majors added that “it is well that we be given a chance occasionally to show the prejudiced world that being black does not hinder the development of a quality of manhood that the world cannot get along very well without.” The stellar performance of African-American soldiers, which needed to be better told in historical accounts of the American military, proved, he asserted, the importance of fairness, opportunity and the humane treatment of Black people, while he claimed,
God is not allowing the great human insult of a marauding mob to stand against us and to remained unanswered . . . God is using our Negro soldiers [in the “punitive expedition” in México] . . . because it is His way of heaping coals of fire upon the heads of our oppressors.
Despite the bitter invective hurled at majors by Julius F. Taylor of the Chicago Broad-Ax, the hatchet was buried by fall 1918, when a long essay by Majors on African-Americans in the cities of the North was published. The entry of the United States in World War One was such that he wrote of “new conditions made favorable to our people consequent of the war,” including the availability of jobs because so many white men were in the American Expeditionary Force.
A massive migration of Southern Blacks to northern cities were, of course, for improved circumstances, but these were temporary. To mitigate what would inevitably happen at war’s end, which was two months later, Majors returned to his previous call: “we must go into business.” Those artificially inflated wages enjoyed by African-American workers meant that many were enjoying a much higher standard of living, but Black Americans needed to be prepared for what was to come when the conflict was over.
This meant a need for “a sensible awakening to the noblest principles of a well-ordered life” because “ignorance has frightened with appalling imagery the crude children of a backward life,” but he also warned about too much reliance on forms of religion that included the exhortations of “the leather lunged, hoarse throated preacher,” “too much of useless noise,” and services and behaviors he deemed as “too grotesque and silly” while they fed ignorance among congregants. Majors added this memorable metaphor:
Civilization is the bomb which the intellectual of every sect must necessarily hurl at this holocaust of superstition and ignorance.
The physician argued that there was “holiness in a clean, healthy mind and body” and which was inculcated “along lines of serenity and quietude” with the added “glory in a good wife and a happy home.” If some of the demonstrative passion of Black church services “was carried into the channels of commerce,” Majors insisted, “we would build up Rockefellers and Carnegies in ebony hue in a day.”
The emotion invested by African-Americans in religious observance was “the greatest, spiritual sham” and he informed readers that “our progress . . . must be determined by our ability to acquire wealth and education” so that “our independence must grow out of these.” Otherwise, Majors warned, “we are but little removed from slavery, a bondage both of head and heart.” Religion was critical, but only conjunction with the others as he averred that “the glorious and righteous will find a nobler heritage than mere forms, ugly and grotesque mutterings, and bedlams.” The writer concluded, with metaphors from the skies,
Today our star is rising in the heavens of grandeur, and of beauty, and of thought, the satellite of genius has become a shooting meteor. The evening stars of our intelligence will light up the dark and chaotic night and dispel this contemptible ignorance like mists before a rising sun. The full blaze of knowledge will be showered upon Ethiopia, and there shall be no more dark nights. Nights of this fearful, insensible ignorance, this monstrous sacrilege, this Saturnalia of accursed oblivion from which affrighted nature in her noblest forms take alarm.
Majors was then named Taylor’s associate editor and he was called “a thorough master of the English language” who “has no superior as an editorial writer.” It was mentioned that he once was editor of the Austin Watchman and the Chicago Conservator and was an editorial contributor to the Freeman, with a couple of examples cited here and bringing him national attention, as did writings for other Black-owners papers and magazines.
Taylor told readers that his compatriot “will have the right to write on any subject” provided “that his articles must breathe the true spirit of Americanism” regarding his views on the government and the war, showing praise for Black troops and African-Americans broadly. He concluded that “with the aid of Dr. Majors some rich literary treats are in store for the many readers of the Broad-Ax.” In fact, the edition of 23 November included praise from the Los Angeles Citizens Advocate for the physician/journalist and his piece on Black people in the North.
While much of his literary output concerned political, economic and social issues for African-Americans, it is notable to see his 21 December essay on “Health and Danger Signals,” with the doctor as he argued that,
Seventy people out of every hundred eat too much meat. Seventy five out of every hundred do not eat enough vegetables. Ninety out of every hundred do not eat enough fruit. Sixty people out of every hundred consume too much alcoholic stimulants [Prohibition, however, was to take effect in not quite a month], and eighty men out of every hundred use too much tobacco. Ninety people out of every hundred do not drink enough water, and Eighty five out of every hundred do not go to bed at the proper time, thereby [not] partaking [of] enough sufficient rest and sleep for the tired and wasted muscles and nerves of the body.
This reads like sound advice more than a century later and he employed another metaphor, that of trains heeding warning signals. Naturally, it was vital that anyone in need of medical assistance, consult a doctor and “stand trial and pay your fee, and be set free of disease at once,” rather than risk a collapse of health.
We will press on with part five and move from the late Teens into the Roaring Twenties in our look at the life and work of Majors, so check back with us for that!