by Paul R. Spitzzeri
How widely read a brief 1919 article was in the Black-owned Chicago Defender concerning the annulment of the second marriage of the prominent physician and associate editor of the Chicago Broad-Ax, Dr. Monroe A. Majors, is not known, but he continued both careers for several more years, though his matrimonial issues also intensified and worsened.
As the 1920s dawned, his editorials and essays in the Broad-Ax, co-edited by Julius F. Taylor, could be viewed in conjunction with those personal problems, though we should be careful about how close an interpretive tie we establish. The 9 April 1921 edition, for example, featured his “Seeing the Negro Close Up,” which begins with the questions, “Do you ever study yourself, reader?” and “Do you ever resort to the microscope for close up inspection?” as well as “Have you really learned how to see your real self, free from bias, and without selfishness?”
He repeated the old canard about honesty being the best policy along with needing awareness to see faults in oneself. His ruminations on right and wrong lead to the remarks that “it is always a good idea to portray the noblest nature” and “if one represents the doctrine of decency and respectability [they] should not dissemble.” Such admonitions continued, along with more reflection,
A light is never to be put under the bed—but on a high place. Truth is the high place in our lives; decency is the acme of our attainments; character is the stronghold of humanity . . . We are capricious beings and often our impulses misdirect and misguide.
Yet, there were were expressions of the hope of personal growth, so that “if we were once merciless, we become merciful” and he invoked the teaching of Christ about throwing stones at glass houses, while environment also mattered. He ended with the advice “we are to stop being too critical and leave fault-finding behind us” and “appreciate the good in each of us and help those to rise out of the environments that are not healthful.”
At the end of the month came a two-part series titled “Lovely Or Beautiful Woman; It Is Impossible To Get Along With Her, And It Is Hard To Get Along Without Her” and while he praised females as “not only wonderful, but magnificent and sometimes beautiful,” he also opined that “as a spiritual being she is misleading, because she may be an angel of light, or a demon of utter darkness. She is not only a captor of men, but a killer of men.”
More remarkable catalog followed: she sought love and fancy clothes “and to have the bill paid by her victim.” She was never pleased and “in her dictionary the word master is defined as slave.” It was true, Majors allowed, that “man may be loathsome” but “woman can be hateful,” while “man can improve,” though “woman needs no improvement she is already perfect.”
While it was allowed that “her wisdom is the phenomina [sic] of the ages,” and that “without woman the proudest mansion would diminish to a veritable shack,” while it was also alleged that “nothing would be worth a struggle because hope would become a relic of man’s barbaric nature,” Majors then remarked that “she is the world’s greatest missionary” while “she is learning to get the money.”
It was woman’s “wonderful humanity is what places her nearer the angels” while her “strong sentimentality, sincerity and determination show her more a potent force in the world than any thing a man has yet done.” Moreover, “she is the world’s best barometer” and that, whatever men did in education, “her ministrations have done for the church from which comes all our development and intellectual life for the last thousand years.”
The second and final part of the essay asserted,
Man is simply a provider, nothing much more than that. Woman is the machinery and perpetual motion that has applied herself to the great world’s needs and she has not stinted, or surrendered her duty. She is always above her male associates in whatever station it may be. She is nobler and more sincere in her humanity . . .
Also lauded were woman’s efforts with temperance, abolitionism and suffrage and addressed these “by the force of her genius, the splendor of her truth, the nobility of her cause.” Naming such notable women as Helen of Troy, the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Queen Victoria and others, Majors gushed that they “have emblazoned the brilliant corridors of wisdom and left the impress of genius upon the lofty summits,” while adding “she has rocked the cradle, and ruled the world.” He rose to the pinnacle of purple prose by proclaiming that woman “is the greater part of God today, as He is manifesting Himself in the flesh.”
Such rhetoric continued with assertions that “her healing spirit” was responsible for human progress, happiness, peace and economic success and “woman’s rightful place is a seat almost alongside the angels.” Majors juxtaposed male attributes with those of woman, seemingly as complementary (mechanical vs. spiritual or respected vs. honored) and then concluded part two with lofty thoughts for a rhetorical ether:
She has truth for innocent lips, love for a trustful heart, and she smiles away the clouds of doubts and fears; and in her gentle speech turns disappointment into success, sorry into joy, woe into happiness. She has done it, no one can do it but woman, and she will forever continue to carry out the noble mission God has assigned to her.
More analysis of American society found expression twice in the Broad-Ax of 7 May with themes of regression and aimless animating editorials that queried “Is the American Retrograding?” and “Whither Are We Drifting?” In the first, he asserted that the rich and the common person apparently thought “that divorce courts are the panacea to cure our ills” and wondered “is marriage a failure?”
Beyond this, he felt that, amid Prohibition, “America is so drunk opportunity and riches its curse is plunging us into a chaos that smacks of perdition” with crime, failed banks, union strikes, monopolizing and other ailments “showing an acute depravity of head and heart. His list of problems was lengthy and he continued that “lynching, harlotry, greed and everything grotesque and low seems to become the maddening echo of American retrogression.”
The dark tone went on with remarks like “we are suffering from the artificialities, and the world is dying a slow unpersecuted death for the real things in man’s life” while he also identified that “egotism and newspaper inflation, bigotry and snobbery triumphs over truth and right trampling both man made laws and God’s heaven sent decrees under their unhallowed feet.” Furthermore, “politics is rotten, seething in its own scum, with a filth and muck that smells to heaven” so that “hell itself seems rampant, and hypocrites are bolder at their deviltry than professed saints are in their good works.”
Such dire depictions were relentless, but in this essay there were no prescriptions as was usual with Majors’ editorializing. In his piece on a drifting American society, another question was posited: “Is nakedness vulgar?” The answer was decidedly yes, as he lamented the move away from “the thumb worn text,” presumably meaning the Bible, while asserting that his mother’s generation were innocent, modest and respectful of virtue. The current generation, however, were women “with the whims of the daring” and who were “grotesque” with a manner that “almost frightens us with her bold approach to nudity.”
He expressed alarm at the openness with which women were openly praised for their shapely legs, well-turned ankles and “voluptuous charms” and so he again posited a question: “Are we nearing the pinnacle of civilization and exhausting to the last dregs the wine of innocence?” Majors pronounced that woman was “the sole entity upon whose shoulders all our ideals are to be sustained and perpetuated,” he argued that early 1920s America needed to return to the “principles and rich truths of our mothers.”
Another possible insight to Majors’ psyche was a poem titled “Impulses of the Soul” and published in the 29 October edition of the Broad-Ax, with some sample lines including:
I cannot describe the feeling that at times I seem to get;
I would like to understand it better than I have as yet.
There are crowded anxious moments when my mind would go to work,
Analyzinz [sic] abstruse dogmas with a seeming jerk.
All at once there comes a notion that I haven’t got a soul,
While I struggle, and the impulse of my heart essay[s] a role
Fit to make a scholar famous with a literary power;
Till I feel that I am shrouded in a starry mental shower.
In a 12 November piece, “The Negro’s Correct Attitude,” these struggles and anxieties surrendered, apparently, to religion, as Majors opened with “fortunately for the Negro he is set upon faith in God” as “the church has long been his Rock of Ages, and this has been his refuge in the time of a thousand storms.” It was also asserted that faith was “a means of cultivation and intellectual development” because religions had colleges and universities as well as provided succor “to the heathen, the poor and the disconsolate.” Majors pronounced that religion did a hundred times more good in the world than any other institution.
Because of the repressive conditions of slavery, the material world was, he argued, not as inspiring to Black Americans, but the church provided those supports that “has made the Negro the wonder race of our times” providing support for eloquence about deliverance and the “hope of eternal life,” this also expressed through song, as in spirituals. The time would come, Majors wrote, in which African-Americans “will prove [themselves] a factor in the economic life when [they have] been given ample time to apply [themselves] to the abstruse complexities of life having in itself the material reaches as well as the mental carry.”
Rising rhetorically, the essayist asked, “what better could the race give to mankind that a beautiful, yet simple christianity?” In religion, equality trumped race so that “its principles manifested in the bosom of the blackest man alive may make him a prince among mortals, and a brother among the great and powerful among mankind.” Majors claimed that “we are very soon to learn that christianity is without color and prejudice” and that “we are to feel in our black skin that we are joint heirs of the Most High.” Consequently,
White, and white teaching, and whitewashing are not to be regarded by the sin sick soul thirsting for the bread [drink?] of life. For years we have had white pictured to our race intelligence that it was the embodiment of all that was pure and holy, when the most fearful practices of evil were perpetrated by people with a white skin. War, and a thousand horrors sent from hell have brought the white race up to a power that seems to subjugate the rest of mankind.
Majors frequently wrote directly and bluntly, but this seemed to be another level, and he drew the conclusion that Black Americans, marrying imagination to the “trained intellect,” and the recourse to the revelations of religion, meant that “we are rapidly learning that heaven is not attainable, but [through?] a result of noble living and righteous action.” Was the writer at least partially speaking of or to himself when he concluded, “God can bring us heavenly peace while we yet live, that follows down the lonesome path of old age making it calm and serene.”
His writings did sometimes address current issues, none more important and concerning to the African-American than the horrors of the Tulsa race massacre of 31 May and 1 June 1921 and of which he wrote in the 11 June edition of his paper. The cause, he observed, was obvious: “for fifty-five years they have been lynching Negroes in these United States” and “Klu-klux, murderers and criminals that have brought disgrace to the white race . . . with the object chiefly to bluff and cower the American Negro” was behind the murder of up to 300 Black Tulsans and the razing of their largely prosperous Greenwood section.
Decrying “the meanest and lowest form of savagery,” Majors thundered that “the white man’s religion and civilization is a sham” and there wasn’t enough in its Christianity “as far as you could throw an elephant.” What Tulsa showed clearly was that “the whole blasted thing has been discarded and discredited” and this meant, furthermore, that “the Negro has found it out, and he has determined to shoot at some of the things that get in his way too.”
Adding that “at Tulsa, as usual; the innocent pay,” Majors noted that “Black men, innocent, pay in life” while “white men, innocent, pay in money.” Inevitably, most white riots and massacres begin with assertions of a Black man’s assault of a white woman. Reminding readers of other race riots in Chicago, East St. Louis and Omaha, the editor fulminated that,
The white man uses the Negro, abuses him, treats him like a stepchild and worse. The black man, uneducated, unstabilized [sic] by a savage inheritance not balanced by a couple of generations of theoretical equality, sinks back into passion, flames up in resentment. The clash comes. The black man loses most in life and property; the white man most in character.
Tulsa was “a bitter, tragic, humiliating business” and honesty was needed in all quarters to find some way to deal with its consequences, along with truly holding those responsible for the massacre to account legally. Majors concluded with a call for “accepting personal responsibility” especially “as we fail to advance a better understanding among American citizens, and in refraining from general recrimination,” because “for that the situation has no room.”
For all of Majors’ active presence in the Broad-Ax and in other Black newspapers, the situation changed dramatically after 1921. He wrote a short demand for the extermination of lynching at the end of 1922, as well as a critique of preachers stealing money from congregants in May, while in August 1923 he penned a lengthier excoriation of “The Trickery of Politics.”
There were also occasional poems, with one called “Some People” which scored white people for their treatment of Asians and Blacks, while another called “Pity Deceiving Women” that, again, may be telling about where Majors was at mentally during the period, per this extract:
Some obstruction blocks the way of the creature
There is evil that is eating out her heart;
If you could only recover
You would find another lover
That is causing you and her to drift apart . . .
She’s an object of pity, not of censure,
You are the fool of course that is blind,
You’ve been the object of her jolly
Of the farce, and cunning folly
Of a woman that’s lost the art of being kind.
The drama that engulfed Majors began with a report in the Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier of 2 June 1923 that he was arraigned on a complaint from his wife, Jessie, about his alleged “disorderly conduct” and to which the physician requested a jury trial. The arrest warrant was based on her claim that he beat her because of his jealousy, while he responded that “he had seized her to prevent her killing him” when, during an argument, she grabbed a pistol and he took hold of her by the head and she fell causing injuries.
The article continued that Majors asserted his wife committed “various indiscretions with other men and women,” including purported “wild parties” that generated two barrels of illicit liquor, and that she intended to shoot him because “he confronted her with discoveries made by detectives he had hired.” Jessie’s attorney rejoined that “Dr. Majors is cruel, unreasonable, and inordinately suspicious of his wife and that his mind is so unbalanced” that she had to have someone with her when out and about.
Then, the Defender of 16 June 1923 remarked that “on complaint of his wife, Mrs. Jessie Majors . . . Dr. Monroe Majors, age 58, the well-known physician . . . was sent to the Psychopathic hospital for observation” because she “declares she was forced to leave him because of his alleged attempts on her life.” Meanwhile, he was losing some of his sight and had an eye operation in April 1924.
In its 31 January 1925 edition, the Defender reported that, after a three-day proceeding, a Chicago judge awarded Jessie a divorce and noted that the case “had quite a history behind it” including “sensational evidence” of an “unsavory nature,” though this was suppressed by the lawyers for both sides. This included her allegation that, in mid-December 1922, he threw a hammer at her, drew a pistol and slapped her and that, five months later, he beat her into sensibility.”
The paper remarked that “the doctor did not deny the charge but said he did it in self-defense when Mrs. Majors snapped a revolver at him twice.” This led him to file a divorce suit on the grounds that she tried to kill him. It was also stated that “many allusions were made to moral indiscretions by both parties,” though names were withheld to avoid having those persons being “besmirched.” The judge found the testimony “very conflicting” and the case “difficult to decide,” though “the evidence slightly predominated in favor of Mrs. Majors,” while he declined to award her alimony and ended $15 weekly payments to her.
The Defender reported that Dr. Majors was given possession of the house, though she received half of its ownership, and its furnishings, as well as another property, though Jessie was said to be “pleased with the court’s order.” The history of the case included a January 1923 divorce filing by her on the charge of adultery, though this was dismissed. In May, the current case was initiated and Dr. Majors arrested for assaulting Jessie, though this, too, was dismissed. An arrest on 4 June followed when he was accused of carrying concealed weapons and an attempt was made to have him committed to a psychiatric facility, but he was released, apparently on a bond, but the next day Majors was taken to the hospital, though his attorneys had him released after a habeus corpus filing.
The paper noted that “the two years of domestic difficulties have been a stormy period for the doctor” including failed attempts by Jessie to take the house and to have him jailed for failure to pay the $15 alimony, while efforts to get the property equally divided also collapsed. Finally, the doctor was involved in several auto accidents and sustained injuries “and also suffered from total blindness,” though the operation restored sight in one eye.
The 22 August edition of the Defender noted that Dr. Majors was married again, his fourth nuptial taking place in April, but Jessie sued for half of the income from renters at the house and requested a receiver to oversee it because she was refused the money, an accounting or access to the residence. On his side, the doctor answered that she owned him $6,000 for payment of notes and maintenance costs since the house was bought a half-dozen years ago.
Two weeks later, as the warring parties hurled more accusations of improper behavior during a hearing, an out-of-court settlement was suggested with Jessie asking for $6,000 in one payment, though stating she would take no less than $5,000. More trouble arose in summer 1926, when Bertha Majors, about a year after marrying Monroe, was ready to file for divorce claiming he hit her on the head with a vanity table bench and a cousin and her husband had to pull him off of her. At a hospital, she was found to have lacerations and a near fracture on her skull as well as bruises from what she said was choking and kicking from the physician.
From her bed in the facility, Bertha told of her 14 months of marriage including “fits of jealous anger, suspicions, abuse, and false charges,” as well as “watching her continually,” sleeping in other rooms, calling police in the middle of the night claiming shots were fired in the house and a man jumped out a window—all of which led her to think that Monroe was insane and, if not that, that he was a brute and should be punished.
The doctor told the paper he expected her to return home and had “nothing to say against” her, though if she did file for divorce “then I will have plenty to say” including a defense concerning the evening of the violent altercation. The Defender commented that,
He did say, however, that since the publicity given to his last sensational divorce suit his practice has decreased to almost nothing and he fears he will be ruined completely if he is made a victim of any more publicity growing out of his wife’s charges. Just now he is anxious for a reconciliation to avoid any more publicity.
The couple remained separated, but, at the end of 1927, Bertha filed for financial support until a divorce could be obtained and included in her petition that “the doctor ordered her out of the house and threatened her life.” He responded that the 1926 fight was because she wielded a baseball bat and he grabbed the bench for protection, while her injuries were, as with Jessie, due to a fall and hitting her head on a door hinge. He also pleaded poverty with respect to any sought-after support.
With this, we’ll conclude tomorrow with part seven, including Majors’ return, after more than four decades, to Los Angeles, so check in with us then.
I think being a newspaper editorial writer or a church pastor is a difficult job. They are expected to speak or write so frequently, even when there isn’t always something new to say or a deeper truth to share. Dr. Majors seemed to take on both roles at times.