by Paul R. Spitzzeri
A shorter article on the second page of the special section devoted to African-Americans in Los Angeles in the 12 February 1909 (the 100th birthday of Abraham Lincoln) concerned the Forum organization and it was written by Theodore W. Troy, another of the notable Black residents of the Angel City from the mid-1890s through the 1910s.
Troy (1870-1952) was born in Cincinnati, where his father and uncle were tellers in a Black-owned bank. He came to Los Angeles in 1895 and because a substitute and then a full-time mail carrier, but he also showed an early interest in the African-American community when, that October, when he became the recording secretary of the Young Men’s Afro-American League.
The League’s new president, succeeding California Eagle publisher John J. Neimore, was Andrew J. Roberts, who owned the first Black mortuary in Los Angeles and whose wife was a granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, while his son, Frederick (who died the same week as Dr. Alva C. Garrott—see part two of this post) was the first African-American graduate of Los Angeles High School and served in the California Assembly.
In January 1899, Troy married Estella Washington and continued his work as a mail carrier before opening a furniture store near the corner of San Pedro and 12th streets, which was in the Black-majority neighborhood that is now the Fashion District. Whe the Forum was established in February 1903 with Troy as secretary, the Times of 27 February remarked,
Southern negroes are invading Southern California. From two states, especially, Georgia and Texas, an exodus of colored people has taken place that is greatly increasing the black population of Los Angeles and other towns near by . . .
There are numerous reasons for this influx of Afro-Americans. For several years, it is said, the negroes of Texas and Georgia have had impressed upon them the impossibility of making much advancement with such overwhelming odds against them as the public sentiment in the South has raised. The frequent denial of their political rights, the race hatred which has vented itself in burning at the stake without trial when accused of crime, and the general lack of opportunity in the Southern States have caused the more progressive colored people to turn their eyes elsewhere.
For many years Los Angeles has had a number of Southern negroes, who have made considerable advancement, materially and mentally, and these people have urged upon their Southern brethren the charms of the Land of Sunshine.
Most of the new migrants were tradespeople, not farmers, and settlement was in the southeastern part of the city, though why this area was the location was not stated—restrictive covenants, in fact, were what confined people of color to areas south and east of downtown, while others settled in Pasadena.
The Forum, then, was established and it was commented that, “the colored people who have been located here some time have formed an organization which has as one of its objects the welfare of these newcomers and the looking out for them on their arrival and until they get work.” Also important for the club was “a fight against the dives and negro clubrooms that have proved a curse to many of the colored young men and not a few white persons” and “to provide a place of meeting . . . with wholesome amusements, games and music.” Lastly, “a series of public meetings is to be held to arouse general sentiment against the city’s pitfalls for the black man, and interest in the society’s work,” starting at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church on Azusa and San Pedro streets.
In 1906, Troy was a member of an agricultural committee for the Afro-American Congress of California and mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the office of City Auditor. He was involved in the Black Y.M.C.A., of which more we’ll see with Thomas A. Garrett, and had mining interests near Tucson, Arizona. In 1913, he was cited by the Times as among several possible candidates, including the well-known Robert C. Owens, for what would have been the first Black seat on the Los Angeles City Council, though another half century elapsed before Gilbert Lindsay was elected and became the first African-American to serve on the governing body.
To a great deal of coverage in the Eagle, Troy was best known as a chief promoter at the end of the Teens of an African-American colonization scheme near Ensenada in Baja California, México, that became known as “Little Liberia.” The ambitious endeavor sought to settle hundreds of Black Americans in the Santa Clara Valley to the east as part of a major agricultural colony.
Though the project faltered within a decade, with Los Angeles lawyer Hugh Macbeth accused of misappropriating funds while the board, including Troy, were also negligent in their management. Troy and his family, as well as brother Claudius, remained residents in the Santa Clara Valley there for many years.
In his article on The Forum, Troy began by noting that,
This large body was organized . . . for the purpose of encouraging united effort on the part of negroes for their advancement, and to strengthen them along lines of moral, social, intellectual, financial and Christian ethics . . . the humblest citizen has access to [Forum] meetings and can state his grievance before this body . . . In our work among moral lines the permanent issue has been the suppression of the vicious element . . .
Working with churches, newspapers and the Los Angeles Police Department to promote “moral uplift,” while the Forum provided “a chance given to [Black residents] to meet the best class of our race and become useful members of society.” Moreover, Troy informed readers,
Our organization teaches race love, race pride and declares a good character to be the highest social credential. It looks with pride upon those who are smilingly taking up the responsibilities of life, in helping to uplift the race and only asks those who are dodging these responsibilities not to be stumbling blocks to us. The intellectual food of the Forum is derived from the various lectures and papers read from time to time by some of America’s brainiest thinkers and scholars.
The Forum was a philanthropic organization with all funds collected going to charitable works, but also informed members that, while land was “now within reach of the ordinary laborer,” this would not always be the case, and so buying real estate was advised as the best move for small investors. He added that the organization was essential in establishing a colony near Victorville, this at Sidewinder Valley north of today’s city of Apple Valley, while it also worked to help found banks, business houses and stores.
Troy continued that “the Forum believes the negroes of this city are fairly entitled, from a business standpoint, to more recognition than is given them by several great local corporations” because “the money spent by negroes for gas, electricity, telephone, [street]car fare, etc.. surely entitles them to patronage from these great business bodies.” It was to be hoped that there would be recognition of the fact that African-American money “for labor, or the product of his labor, remains in this country and build[s] up its institutions.”
The Forum also supported “the majesty of the law and advocates its respect,” supported outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt’s programs and “declares Booker T. Washington our greatest benefactor.” Moreover, it exhorted “members to conduct themselves in such a manner as to win the respect of the people of their communities and thereby create favorable race sentiment.” It also stipulated that “the giving of menial positions” as hardly qualifying as “the fulfillment of patronage due negro taxpayers.” It then pointed to Christian ethics as vital and “classes the church as the highest institution.”
Finally, the organization emphasized its charitable work, including to outside recipients such as victims of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 and race riots in Atlanta the same year, while giving to local institutions like the Florence Crittenden and Sheltering Arms homes, while it informed readers that “the Forum has always worked in harmony with the church and has been especially active in work with the colored Y.M.C.A.”
Speaking of this last organization, the article “Just What The Negro Expects” was penned by its secretary, Thomas A. Greene (1867-1949). A native of Ripley, Mississippi, he was one of 19 children born to a carpenter and dairyman, who died when Greene was barely in his teens so he and some brothers took over the latter business. Remarkably, though he was illiterate until 19 years of age, Greene graduated from Rust College in his home state eight years later and earned a teaching certificate.
He also went to Walden University at Nashville for two years and then taught for about a dozen, half of these at Alcorn A&M College, now Alcorn State, in Mississippi, where he learned the printing trade. In 1894, Greene married a Rust classmate, Lula Walton, and the couple had six children, while, as the century came to a close, he ran the Mississippi Sentinel at the state capital of Jackson He briefly ran the printing department at Walden before resigning for health reasons
The family migrated to Los Angeles in 1902, residing for a time in Pasadena, and Greene launched a weekly newspaper called the Enterprise and he was also a founder of the Colored Men’s Building and Loan Association. Shortly after the formation of the Black Y.M.C.A., he became its secretary and held this position for over a quarter century, until 1932, after which he worked in insurance, including maintaining a home office in later life and working until he was 80 years old. A signal achievement was his role in what is known as the 28th Street Y.M.C.A. building, a Paul Williams-designed landmark recently renovated into an apartment complex.
Greene was also a founding director of the local Urban League branch and was a trustee of the Outdoor Life and Health Association, as well as heavily involved with the Wesley Methodist Church. A 1948 African-American Who’s Who entry observed that “through the years [he] has been an outstanding factor in every movement for the uplift of Negroes in Southern California” and lived in a way “that has been devoted entirely to the educational and spiritual uplift of his fellowman.”
Greene began his essay by noting that it was timely for the son of slaves and from the South that “a great newspaper should ask a black man” the question that formed the piece’s title. He asserted that some elements of the “race problem” were solved, but that the African-American population “expects fair treatment and its rights under the Constitution,” while adding “no sane man, white or black, expects the negro to get his rights by further legislative enactments” as there were enough laws on the books.
The Declaration of Independence, the 250th anniversary of which is next year with the Homestead to offer programs with that very much in the forefront, and the Constitution guaranteed inalienable rights to Black people, as well as “the American spirit of fair play” and the Christian spirit, so that,
The negro simply expects, living in a Christian country, that he, himself a Christian, should be treated as a Christian. The negro should have an equal opportunity, with other citizens, “to make good.” He knows, if he is level-headed, that his destiny is in his own hands, and that he must not expect others to work it out—but he wants fair play.
Decried was the view of some that the “negro problem” could only be handled “by deportation, extermination or the withdrawal of civil and political rights, thus reducing the negro to a nonentity.” A justification for this view was the claim that there was no example in human history in which “two races so differently spiritually, intellectually and physically, as the white man and black man of America, have ever lived on amicable terms.”
This was countered by Greene’s assertion that “in the history of no nation has the hand of God been so manifested as in the history of this country, especially in the last half-century” and that “men make history; history does not make men.” Dismissing what happened the previous year or a thousand years ago, as these had “no direct bearing on what we shall accomplish today,” the writer went on that,
We have a right to expect to be dealt with as other men are dealt with and to be judged according to our measure as citizens. There is no question as to the gratefulness of the American negro to his friends North and South . . .
The enemies of the race frequently use the bugaboo of social equality between the races, to alienate people who otherwise would feel kindly toward us . . . there is no such thing as legislating men as social equals . . . the white people who deal most with the intelligent negro in political, business and ecclesiastical relations know best how foreign his desire is to either entertain or encourage this nightmare of florid imagination.
When it came, Greene averred, to “true and sane racial development,” it was understood by “intelligent leaders of higher thought” that “the cry of discord will fail to scare or agitate the nation.” He advocated a phrase, “every man with a man’s needs,” which meant that “it is giving the black man a chance along with other men, to show what there is in him.”
Inadvertent harm could be caused “by expecting the unreasonable,” so he related an incident in which a Black man was arrested by a pair of African-American police officers and a white friend remarked that the Black Y.M.C.A. “will stop crime among your people here and everywhere.” This comment led Greene to rejoin that “it is the same with our men as it is with yours, so far as the criminals are concerned” and California had two prisons, at San Quentin and Folsom, “to restrain the criminal element of both races.”
The piece ended with a reference to a United States senator from Tennessee claiming that Black people asked too many “special privileges” and Greene concluded,
To which charge we plead not guilty; for in the very nature of the peculiar conditions that confront him, the negro is sensible of the fact that his case demands a thoroughly unbiased and an unprivileged identification with American citizenship. He reasons that special legislation for him predicates special legislation against him.
As has been observed in this post, the idea of the “New Negro” in late 19th and early 20th century America in many ways aptly applies to such Los Angeles luminaries as Troy and Greene, as well as Dr. Garrott, all born in the several years after Emancipation and the Civil War and representative of a generation of Black Americans making phenomenal strides in a matter of under a half-century.
We’ll return with part four and more remarkable content from this special section of the Times more than 115 years ago, so be sure to join us then.
While reading about African Americans, the terms race and ethnicity inevitably came up. I’ve never fully understood the distinction between these two words, nor the logic behind how they are used in forms required by government agencies, public health departments, public services offices, and other official surveys.
As far as I know, race is generally related to physical characteristics, while ethnicity refers more to language and cultural identity; and within one racial group, there can be multiple ethnicities. For example, under the racial category of “Asian,” there are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and many others.
However, the forms I’ve seen rarely follow this logic. They usually list ethnicity before race, and in most cases, the only ethnicity question is “Are you Hispanic or Latino?” That makes me wonder: is “Hispanic/Latino” considered equivalent to “Asian,” and therefore supposed to be a race? Moreover, I find it hard to understand the reasoning behind dividing the entire world’s population into “Hispanic” and “non-Hispanic.”
I’ve asked many times why these classifications are designed this way – so inconsistent, illogical, and sometimes even ridiculous – but I’ve never received a satisfying answer. Most people simply say, “You can skip that part.”
I heard that the government issued a new format in 2024, though most forms haven’t yet been updated in practice. Regardless of what the new questions look like, my fundamental question remains: why are these Race/Ethnicity questions needed at all?
Hi Larry, yours is an important question and there are ongoing debates about the terms and what they mean. Another example is what constitutes an “Asian” and the vast differences between countries and cultures in that part of the world. With respect to this post on Black residents of Los Angeles, it is notable that newspaper references to people of color routinely refer to people as “negro” or “Mexican” or “Chinese” but did not do so for white people, because they were the majority in population and power. In our time, with so many people, and increasing numbers of them, of mixed, or multiple, races/ethnicities, how do we classify them beyond “other”?